When Ashley first awoke, she didn’t immediately open her eyes. An instinct told her to take it slowly, just as she did in the gym, after coming in from the cold, during warm-ups and stretching.
She knew she was in a comfortable bed. Some machine nearby was humming and beeping softly. A loudspeaker somewhere called a doctor to the operating room.
Carefully opening her eyes, Ashley saw a nurse sitting beside the bed looking at the beeping machine and taking notes on a clipboard.
“Hi, there! How do you feel?”
“Meat slicer . . . I was the meat.”
The nurse chuckled. “Don’t try to move, as you’ve got lots of bandages, and you’ll need help for a while. There are some people in the waiting room, if you feel like visitors . . .”
“Sure.”
Ashley’s mother was the first one in the door, but her legs gave out when she beheld her daughter completely wrapped in bandages, save for two eyes peering out. Luckily, Ashley’s father caught her.
While her father helped her mother into a chair, Brother Jacob, Sister Rachael, Sarah, Liberty, and Ilika all gathered around the bed.
“Hi, guys!” Ashley said in greeting.
They all waved and said embarrassing things about Ashley’s courage, and expressed wishes for her quick recovery. Liberty, however, remained silent,
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clearly fighting back tears.
Finally, when everyone else had had plenty of time to speak, Liberty cleared her throat. “Um . . . I haven’t done this yet because I wanted you to hear it, Ashley.” She turned and knelt on the floor in front of Ashley’s mother and father. “It happened because . . . someone was trying to kill me . . . and Ashley saved my life. Please, if you’re mad at anybody, you should be mad at me. And if there’s anything I can ever do for her . . . or for you . . . I’ll do it . . .
no matter what it takes.”
They were deeply touched. The woman just wiped at her eyes, so her husband spoke. “We raised Ashley to always do the right thing, even when that required a personal sacrifice. It looks like . . .” He paused to deal with mixed feelings. “It looks like we succeeded.”
Liberty hung her head, until Ashley’s mother reached out and touched her on the shoulder.
At that moment, a nurse entered. “There’s a sheriff here to interview Ashley. I told him he had to keep it short and simple.”
“You feel up to it, Ashley?” Brother Jacob asked.
“Sure. I even feel ready for a good workout in the gym!”
Everyone chuckled nervously with cringes of pain at the thought.
“We’ve examined the scene, and we’ve already interviewed everyone else, so I just have a few quick questions to complete my investigation.”
Brother Jacob sat down nearby.
“When you were running beside Chelsea toward the door, what made you decide the man standing there was a danger?”
“He was aiming a gun at Chelsea.”
“Were you sure it was a gun?”
“I was as sure as I could be.”
He wrote in his notebook for a moment. “I have to ask this next question, even though I can find out from public records. Have you ever killed anyone before, Ashley?”
Ashley glanced at Sister Rachael.
“You only have to answer if you want to, Ashley.”
Ashley looked troubled. “I don’t mind answering. No, I haven’t. But . . .
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did I kill someone this time?”
Brother Jacob answered. “The man broke his neck when he went through the window, Ashley. However, what you did is not a crime, because you were defending yourself and another person.”
Ashley wasn’t listening. She was crying softly and wishing she could curl up in a little ball and hide somewhere. She had never imagined, in her wildest dreams, that she would ever kill someone with her gymnastics skills.
As soon as the sheriff stepped back, Sarah came over to the side of the bed and took Ashley’s hand. “I’ve never been tested like that . . . but I hope that if I ever am, I make the right choice . . . like you did.”
Ashley’s father joined Sarah. “Honey, your mother and I also feel that you made the right decision. Imagine how terrible you’d feel right now if you had stood by and watched your friend die.”
“I’d feel ten times as bad!” Ashley wailed.
“Yes, you did the right thing,” her mother said, finally gaining the courage to come close.
Ashley looked at her parents. “I hope and pray I made the right choice.”
The sheriff was about to leave when Liberty stood up. “Sir, I need to add something to my statement.”
“Of course, Chelsea.”
“When you asked me if I knew who would want to kill me, I wasn’t thinking very deeply. I was just thinking about myself.”
“And you have a new idea?”
“Yes. You see, the name Chelsea is just for cover. My real name is Liberty Buchanan, and I’m Senator Michael Buchanan’s daughter.”
Everyone in the room could see the wheels turning in the sheriff’s head.
“Okay. Now I’m beginning to see what might be going on here. So . . . the attempt on your life, Liberty, may have been an effort to influence your father.”
Liberty
nodded.
“And since it appears there were two men,” the sheriff went on, “and one is still unaccounted for . . .”
“We’re not going to let her out of our sight,” Brother Jacob promised.
“Good. Way out there in the woods, there’s not much the Department can
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do.”
“We understand,” Sister Rachael said.
“Thank you for the additional information, Liberty . . . Chelsea,” the sheriff said. He shook hands with several people, and then left with a wrinkled brow.
The evening was warm and buggy, so Kibi tapped a code into her bracelet and the insects kept their distance.
News that a Lyceum member had been badly hurt, while saving another from an attempt on her life, had circulated all over the campus.
Unfortunately for the crew of the Manessa Kwi, Lyceum members were very good at keeping secrets, so little more could be learned. Ilika shared the whole story.
Kibi burst out laughing.
Ilika looked at her askance.
“I’m sorry,” Kibi said between chuckles and gasps. “I’m not laughing at Ashley or Chelsea. I’m laughing at us!”
Ilika joined in the humor of the situation.
“What
is it about this mission?” she begged to know. “We just cannot seem to ever be in the right place at the right time!”
“I can only make a guess,” Ilika began, smiling in the dark, “but it may not be worth anything because . . . I haven’t had much more training at these kinds of missions than the rest of you.”
“Please, make your best guess before I tear out my last remaining strand of hair!”
Ilika laughed, knowing Kibi’s head was as bushy as ever. “We’re used to being the most important part of a mission. When we take cargo or transport passengers somewhere, we’re the only ship doing it. But this mission is different. Many other beings are involved, and the situation is very complex, with the outcome unknown to anyone, except maybe . . . you know . . .
Melorania or Kerloran.”
“Okay, I think I’m starting to see. We have some part to play, somewhere, sometime, but no one knows when our cue will come.”
“Right. And we’re in training to tell the difference between things that are related to the mission, and things that aren’t. People get murdered, and
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people get cut up by glass, all the time. It really pulled at my heart because I went through the whole evaluation process with those two, and now they’re my friends. Shawn too. But . . .”
“But they’re not the mission!” Kibi finished. “None of them are doing anything that’s . . . how did Arantiloria put it? . . . that’s of enduring value for the universe.”