“Which company is it?” Jace asked.
Tayel swiveled to face him, but he focused straight ahead.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not say,” Shy said. “As I was starting to explain, huge numbers of our employees started to go missing in the last year — especially raiders. People kept turning to my father for answers, but he didn’t have any. He started to pull away from people, started delegating major operations to barely qualified field leads. Rumors spread that he was having secret meetings late into the night, but no one knew with whom. Not even his family.”
Shy’s eyes went from moving across everyone else’s faces to staring deeply into the lantern. They blinked slowly, dark, narrow, and in the soft orange light, beautiful. Tayel rapped her fingers on the tarp beneath her. Shy sucked her lips the way Mom did right before she cried. It might just have been a story to the rest of them, but to Shy, it mattered.
She continued, “A little over a week ago, I think I finally met who he’d been having secret meetings with. I was organizing files with my brother in the main office, where father worked. Two people I’d never seen before walked in. A guard didn’t announce them; they didn’t have an escort. Honestly, I thought they were there to attack us.
“There was a frail-looking Argel, and then a human man who appeared anything but frail. His name was Ruxbane, and he claimed to be there to meet with my father. He didn’t say what about, and father demanded my brother and I leave. We did, but my brother — Locke — was fed up with secrets. He went back to investigate without me.”
“You didn’t go with him?” Fehn asked.
Shy did something Tayel didn’t think the other woman capable of doing: she blushed.
“My brother is sort of — he is very good at getting people to stay put,” Shy stammered. “He left me in the charge of his personal guards, and changed the codes on my door.
“He came back twenty minutes later, just as the alarms started going off. I had no idea what was happening. I asked him countless questions but he didn’t answer one. In fact, he told me to stop asking questions — of him, and of father. He told me he was leaving and that it was too dangerous to go with him. Father would keep me out of harm so long as I stayed out of the way, Locke said.”
“Alarms and guards,” Fehn murmured.
“What is it?” Tayel asked.
He shook his head.
Shy watched him for a moment, but when he didn’t add comment she said, “Looking back, I can’t believe I let him get away, but I still had one thing going for me. My brother — for all his wit — has never been very aware whilst in a hurry. He missed me removing his journal from his bag while he packed.”
“A journal?” Tayel asked.
“Yeah. A journal.”
“Like, a hard drive? Or a computer?”
Shy lifted a book from the space behind her and wiggled it in the air.
“I skimmed it right after he’d gone. It didn’t take long for me to understand things looked bad, and that Locke was in danger. He’d been researching my father’s activities for a while. I can’t imagine what he finally saw to make him take off like he did, but at the time, all I knew was I had to leave, too. I packed the essentials, went to the hangar, found my ship, and took off for Modnik. My brother mentioned the planet constantly in his findings, so of course that’s where he’d go. Everything would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the fleet in orbit.”
Tayel almost fell out of her seat, she was leaning so far forward. “A fleet?”
“I escaped thanks to a cloaking device onboard, but not without damage. Some fighter managed to knock out my FTL drive, leaving me to rely on fuel. Needless to say, I couldn’t make it all the way to Modnik.”
“That’s why you landed here, on Elsha,” Tayel said.
“Yes, but the story would have ended there if it wasn’t for your friend.” She nodded to Fehn.
He stiffened.
“What do you mean?” Tayel asked.
“I’ll go into details later, if you really want them. For now, just understand that if it wasn’t for him, my ship would be confiscated and none of us would have any chance of getting off this planet.”
Tayel resisted the urge to stare Fehn down. She knew he and Shy were connected somehow. She cycled through a couple different questions to ask, but Jace spoke first.
“Why Modnik?”
Shy flipped to a page in her brother’s journal and passed it across to Jace, who took it after a few seconds of hesitation. “He has a contact there. Every piece of writing in that book is either the contact’s or my brother’s. I had time to read almost all of it since I landed here. This contact had well-researched intel. Shapeshifter sightings, details on some Varg election… He wrote about brainwashed raiders, people taking over the council government, and that alien race I mentioned earlier. That’s where I got the idea from. If anything, he seems to have gotten the raiders right, because trust me, they aren’t behind all this.”
“Why did they use such primitive communication?” Jace asked. He set the book beside him, and Tayel picked it up.
“Increased security is my best guess. It’s hard to hack a piece of paper.”
Tayel flipped to a page and read a few lines. Odd happenings. Late meetings into the night. Everything Shy mentioned rested on these pages. Tayel stopped on a phrase.
They come through portals black and wavering.
Black, wavering portals. A dull ache settled in the back of her head. Two weeks ago, Mom’s hand in her own, fear ate at her resolve every time she saw those dark, shimmering ovals tucked away on street corners, storefronts, and hazy alleys. She read faster.
They come through quickly, before the window to another world snaps shut. They look like any one of us. Like a Varg, or a human, or an Argel. But, Locke, you know as well as I that they are not us. They wear our skin and speak our tongue, but tossed aside legends of old hold the truth which has been kept secret. These beings — these shapeshifters — are Rokkir.
“Tayel.”
“Huh?”
“See anything interesting?” Shy asked.
“Yeah,” Tayel said. “Rokkir.”
“Ah, yes. Rokkir is what they call the shapeshifters. That’s what I’ve been building up to. This war couldn’t have been started by the raiders. It had to be them — the Rokkir.”
Tayel tried to swallow, but her mouth had run dry.
“Right.” Fehn walked over and snatched the book out of Tayel’s hands. “No offense, but that’s ridiculous.”
“I know it sounds unlikely, but you have to trust me. All the evidence my brother found points to it.”
“There’s no proof here,” Fehn said, flipping through the old pages. “Just ramblings.”
“That’s all I saw, too,” said Jace. “Besides, if it had any merit, this would’ve be taken to the authorities and they’d have dealt with it.”
Shy rolled her eyes and sighed. “No, see, you weren’t listening. These Rokkir are taking over the government. Locke and his contact mentioned officials going missing and then reappearing as though nothing happened. They wrote about secret meetings, strange behavior — all of it! It’s all there. The council has been taken over.”
“I believe you,” Tayel said.
“What?” Jace gave her a look like she’d grown a second head.
“One of the notes Locke’s contact wrote mentioned dark portals. Don’t you remember? That’s what started this whole mess: the black portal we found at Sif Field.”
“Those could have been anything, Tayel. Does that really justify a jump to believing in shapeshifters?”