Sara returned to the dining room just as they were finishing up.
“Message from Daelen,” she announced. “He says he’s giving you an hour to let your breakfast go down and warm-up, then he expects you in his training centre.”
Cat arched her eyebrows. “Does he now?”
“Jessica’s gone to get you a combat suit each. It’s a lightweight, magically resistant body armour made from—”
“—Made from some kind of clever synthetic fabric, no doubt.”
“Uh-oh,” Mandalee remarked, knowing how her friend would react to that.
“Well, Daelen can ‘expect’ what he likes, but there is no way in hell I’ll be wearing any such thing.”
Sara offered an apologetic smile. “He’s used to getting his own way.”
“I bet he is,” Cat agreed.
“If it helps,” Mandalee put in, trying to smooth things over, “I’ll give it a try, and I’m quite looking forward to a physical workout with a shadow warrior. Maybe he’ll even teach me some of his powers.”
Cat shrugged. “His major destructive powers don’t interest me much, except on a purely academic level. They’re overrated and disruptive to nature. I’m a little surprised you would consider using them yourself.” She breathed deeply as she stood and stretched out the kinks in her muscles. “Ah,” she remarked, “I can feel my stubborn streak surfacing. Daelen is going to find me very picky about what I choose to do today.”
“Well, as my sister would say,” Sara offered, “‘Don’t shoot the messenger, love’.”
“Not at all,” Catriona assured her. She was unfamiliar with the expression, but the meaning was plain enough. “That won’t happen again. Thank you for the message, Sara. What happens after you deliver it is no fault of yours.”
“Anyway,” Mandalee spoke up, “since we have time to kill, why don’t we talk about you for a while? You and your sister, what’s your story?”
“You mean, ‘What’s a nice pair of girls like us doing in a place like this’?” came a voice from the doorway.
They turned and saw Jessica walk in, wearing an outfit that covered her from her neck down to her ankles, leaving only her tail sticking out. It seemed to cling to her skin, smoothing every contour. Mandalee was immediately fascinated by it. In many ways, except for the colour, it wasn’t all that different, in principle, to her own leather outfit. Something designed for maximum flexibility while, she suspected, offering more protection than the thin fabric would suggest.
Turning back to Sara, she wondered, “Is that one of those combat suits you were talking about?”
Sara agreed it was, and Jessica obligingly did a pirouette to show it off.
“You like?” Jessica asked.
“I do,” the assassin agreed. “My friend’s not keen.”
“As I said, though,” Cat reiterated, “I do appreciate the technical skill that can create such fabric.” She walked over to Jessica and moved to feel the fabric on the girl’s arm. “May I?”
“Sure thing, dear,” she replied. “Maybe it’ll help you change your mind.”
As soon as Cat’s hand touched Jessica, she yelped in pain and snatched it back.
“Maybe not,” Sara remarked, rushing over to examine Cat’s hand. The skin had turned red and inflamed with small, raised white patches of swelling. “Looks like an extreme allergic reaction.”
“It’s OK,” Cat assured them. “It’s nothing serious, I’ll have it healed in no…time…” she trailed off.
“What’s wrong?” Mandalee asked.
Cat reminded her that she couldn’t access her powers in this world.
“We should get you to the medical bay.” Sara offered.
Mandalee shook her head. “I’ll do it,” she volunteered. “My deal with nature means my powers work fine no matter where I am.”
Cat held up her uninjured hand and asked her to wait. “I want to test a theory,” she insisted, wincing with the pain, “in the portal room.”
They walked through the maze of corridors and opened the door to the room with the permanent portals to other worlds. Catriona could immediately sense which one was Tempestria. Breathing deeply, she reached out her senses to receive the Blessing of Alycia, Mother of Nature. Connection restored, it was a simple matter to heal the inflammation of her skin.
“As I thought,” Cat mused. “All I need is a doorway to our world, and I can do everything here that I can do there.”
“That link’s important to you, isn’t it?” Sara observed. “Not just for your magic, but to who you are.”
Cat nodded.
“Believe me, we can relate,” Sara sighed with a wistful smile. “My sister and I come here often, just to be close to our world. A world we can never see again.”
“Why not?” Mandalee asked. “If you don’t mind me asking. Feel free to tell me to mind my own business.”
“Aww, rubbish!” Jessica chimed in dismissively. “There’s no harm in telling ’em, is there, sis?”
Sara agreed. “It’s not like we get to be ourselves around many people. ‘Hi, I’m really a purple Chetsuan girl from another world that I can never go back to’ isn’t the best chat-up line.”
“Who needs chat-up lines? Some of us just find the nearest cute elf boy and stick our tongue down his throat,” Jessica teased.
“But seriously,” Sara continued, refusing to rise to it. “If you want our story, we’re perfectly happy to share. There’s no point in making it a secret.”
“As my sister says,” Jessica explained, “we’re Chetsuan girls. That’s our name for our species: Chetsuan. Our world, Phitonia, is that one there,” she pointed to the second portal from the right. “Unfortunately, we shared our world with these flying lizards called dragons. They had a different name for us: dinner.”
“In the old days,” Sara took up the story, “our people found ways to defend themselves and build a civilisation, despite not being top of the food chain. Then, a few decades ago, the red dragon Mallax rose to power. We don’t really know the details.”
“Yeah,” Jessica agreed. “Dragon politics wasn’t big on the school syllabus, was it, love? Back when there was a school. But as far as we understand it, even other dragons were scared of him and sort of fell into line or else. Now, by all accounts, Mallax had what I guess you might call a food allergy.”
“Specifically, to Chetsuans,” Sara put in.
“Yeah, even proximity to us brings him out in hives something rotten, poor dear. So, he decided, if we were no good to him, we were no good for any dragon, and suddenly we’re off the menu. Which might seem like a good thing, except…”
“…Except that meant we got downgraded from dinner to vermin,” Sara explained. “Their determination to exterminate us destroyed everything our people had built. Civilisation gone, our people were forced underground to live with the rats.”
“All vermin together. Vermin United!” Jessica declared, punching the air, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“We spent our early teens moving from one hole in the ground to another. We grew up fast, until one day, when it was our turn to gather food. Always a risk, but obviously a necessary one.”
“That’s when we got snatched,” Jessica revealed, “and taken to the black dragon, Zacar. I guess you’d call him a scientist. Working alone as he did, even Mallax didn’t know half of what he got up to. Zacar was looking for a final solution to their infestation problem, and under his orders, there were dragons constantly on the lookout for stray Chetsuans to become his laboratory rats.”
“Longest year of our lives,” Sara lamented. “Which was a hell of an achievement because not many lived that long.”
Mandalee exchanged a glance with Cat. She was beginning to wish she’d never asked.
“What…erm…” the druidess began tentatively, “…what did he do to you?”
The way the two sisters looked at each other at that moment, the shared suffering in their eyes spoke volumes without them ever speaking a word.
In the end, Jessica shook her head emphatically. “No. Don’t want to talk about that. Sorry, love.”
Sara reached out and held her sister close. “You wouldn’t thank us if we did,” she whispered, a haunted look in her eyes.
Mandalee spoke up to say, “I am so sorry for making you relive this,” she apologised, reaching out to them both. “I never imagined…”
“Nothing to be sorry for, dearie,” Jessica assured her. “You haven’t made us do anything, and as for reliving it, it’s not like we’re ever going to forget. We’ve just learned to get on with our lives.”
“But you can’t get on with your lives with your people?” Cat wondered.
“No, never,” Sara shook her head, emphatically. “You see, the reason we survived was that we were Zacar’s successful test rats.”
“Oh, yeah, a real eureka moment for him, it was!” Jessica remarked. “We’re carriers.”
“Carriers?” Mandalee frowned, not understanding.
Catriona did. “Plague carriers,” she clarified, tears in her eyes at the horror of the idea.
“Don’t worry, you’re perfectly safe.” Sara assured them. “It can’t jump species. Zacar made sure of that. He snared more of our people from across our world for lab trials. Other than caging them up, he didn’t do a thing to them. He didn’t need to: we did.”
“Yep, we killed them all, we did. Every single one. We couldn’t do anything except sit in our cages and watch them die slowly. Zacar was understandably delighted with us.”
“True to the scientific method,” Sara took up the story, “having successfully proved the formula under laboratory conditions, we would have been released back into the wild as field tests. Then, once our people started dying all around us, he would move on to mass production and create more of us carriers all over our world.”
“Eventually, the carriers would be the last of our species, and if all the carriers were sterilised before they were released…”
“You couldn’t reproduce,” Mandalee realised, “so there would be no need to hunt down the carriers in the end. Give it time and extinction would happen naturally.”
“Thank the stars it never got that far,” Jessica put in.
“What happened?” Mandalee wanted to know.
“Daelen StormTiger happened,” Jessica beamed.
“We’d all heard of him of course,” Sara told them with a smile, “but to be honest, I thought it was just a myth. A story people told to give them hope. That one day, without warning, this superhero would drop out of the sky and save us. He’d done it before, hundreds of years ago, or so the story went. Beaten back the dragons, given our people a chance.” She shrugged. “It obviously didn’t last, so as I said, I never believed he was real.”
“I did,” Jessica put in. “I always did.” A golden flush spread across her face as she continued, “It’s kind of embarrassing, now that I know him, and please don’t tell him I said this, but I used to pray to him. Or at least wish for him. And then, one day, my wish came true. He burst into the lab, tore open our cages, killed Zacar and destroyed every last bit of his research before setting fire to the place and opening up one of his blue portals to this world.”
Sara took up the story. “He made sure we understood what would happen if we ever set foot on our world again. Two carriers might not be enough to wipe out our whole species, but we’d kill anyone we came into contact with. So now, the only Chetsuans we’ll ever see in our lives are each other.”
“Yeah, and I’m sick of the sight of her already,” Jessica remarked, clearly not meaning a word of it.
Sara smiled and gave her a shove. “It’s not so bad,” she asserted. “We live here, mostly, but we’ve been through the portals to other worlds, too.”
“Not to yours,” Jessica interjected. “He was always worried about that Kullos bloke detecting our alien presence, and through us, learning of StormClaw Island, and finding the open doorways to these other worlds. After a year in a cage, having the run of a handful of worlds is pretty cool. Even if we have to wear a perception filter so no-one can see the real us. Except when we go to sci-fi conventions to snog elves.”
“You’re not going to let that go, are you?” Sara laughed.
“Nope.”
“You’re only jealous!”
“Too right, I’m jealous. He was cute, not that I could see much of his face when it was locked onto yours. Nice arse, though.”
Going back to her policy of ignoring her sister’s remarks, Sara explained, “In return for such freedom, all Daelen asks is that we keep his bases running for him. Seems like a small price to pay, really.”
“OK, I admit Daelen can be a bit arrogant and act without thinking,” Jessica allowed, “and I suppose he does see us as serving girls at his beck and call, but it’s not a bad job.”
“And as we said, we have a lot of free time to do whatever we want.”
Mandalee didn’t know what to say, but she certainly wouldn’t have gone with what Cat asked.
“You don’t resent us, do you?”
The two Chetsuans and one human frowned.
“Resent you, dear?” Jessica gasped. “Why on Earth would we do that?”
“Because Daelen is on a mission with us to save our world from Kullos. Does it never occur to you to wonder why, when he could be on your world, saving the Chetsuans from the dragons?”
“Maybe he will, one day,” Jessica shrugged. “Even he can’t be everywhere at once.”
“My sister’s faith aside,” Sara reasoned, “as I understand it, if Kullos wins, he won’t stop with destroying your world. He’s got the whole mortal plane in his sights.”
“The dragons reckon the Chetsuans are vermin,” Jessica growled. “Kullos reckons all mortal life forms are vermin: Chetsuans, dragons, humans, Faery…” Her scowl morphed into a smirk, which she directed at her sister. “…Elves who get snogged at sci-fi conventions.”
“And it’s not just the half dozen worlds through these portals, there are loads more. Point is, there’s a bigger picture. So, no, Catriona, we don’t resent you. Not a bit. Do we, Jess?”
Her sister shook her head. “No way! In fact, Daelen filled us in on the situation on your world when we came in this morning, and we’ve already told him we want to help, even if that just means serving your breakfast and having a chat.”
“Whatever you need from us, it’s yours,” Sara agreed.
“And what you need right now,” Jessica advised, checking the time, “is to get back to your rooms and change for your training session with Daelen.”
“Oh yes, the training session,” Cat echoed with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
“Well, obviously the body armour is out of the question for you,” Sara realised. “And synthetic fabrics in general. We’ll have to try and find something else for you.”
“No need,” the druidess insisted. “I’m fine as I am.”
“He won’t like it,” Jessica warned her.
“That’s OK,” Mandalee, insisted. “I’ll distract him by being his star pupil.”