34. Epilogue

Epilogue

Iryl watched the Phor ship land and the women’s homecoming on his screen with rapt attention. The Human, Ava, was so beautiful. She was exotic compared to the Vorbax women exiting the ship to cheers from their males. The entire colony looked like it had turned out to watch them come home.

He watched Ava, squinting in the sunlight, mouth open in awe, taking in the sights. Uncertainty was clear on her pale face.

On his feed next to the homecoming a program ran, a small screen open in the top corner. It was searching and scanning for the numbers imputed cycles ago from what Ava had uploaded to him before going to Torga. He had access to more files here than anyone on Xai, being on the Galactic Board and plugged into their mainframe. The searches had been running nonstop since meeting with Ava and the others and hearing their eventual goal of finding the rest of her brethren.

He had already found out that the facility she was born at was long since shut down, records scattered. Iryl hadn’t the heart to talk with Ava about it yet, wanting to see the happiness on her face during her first few steps on his home planet.

There was a database though, mostly from the Phor, with numbers that he now was having scanned to locate the Humans born at her facility. There were other operations here and there, but the facility where Ava was born lasted the longest before being closed. The Phor purchased Humans there, like Ava, but no records were fully complete.

That is, until recently.

An anonymous data package had been sent to him, just last cycle, that detailed all the sales the Phor had with the planet Ava was born on and the records they had of the Human inventory at her facility. It held complete records—down to individual biological signatures. Iryl added it to his data pile.

At the bottom, the cryptic message, “She never was just a tool,” read as the signature.

Parsing through the data, Iryl found that Ava was the only one he could reliably trace from her sale to her status in the Phor fleet. The others had all been either resold or expired in Phor care. The facility was shut down and the Phor had turned to other species for helpers soon after her purchase. The rest of the data was still being compiled.

He had another, separate, search running. This scan searched for any matches to the faded auction house image Ava had given him, separate from the file on her family.

Iryl lost himself in watching Ava’s reactions, chuckling when she touched one of their birds that sat on a perch outside where the ship had docked.

His attention got drawn away as one of the searches he had been running pinged. He looked away from her smiling face to scan the file.

His grin grew wider, enlarging the screen to display another Human female. He stared at the result, taking in the new, updated picture that matched the paper one Ava had carried for so long. The woman in it had haunted eyes, but her face was no less beautiful.

Iryl gazed at the face hungrily, her eyes piercing him down into his soul. A smile grew over his face, and he reached his hand out to gently touch the picture on his screen. He did it. He found Joy.

Ava’s story will continue in a few suns.