60. Aru

Aru"s breath fogged in the crisp morning air as he and Dagor made their way toward the gaping maw of the cavern. The night had been cold, and they had spent it huddled around a small fire, taking turns keeping watch over their discovery.

Sleeping on the hard ground hadn"t been fun, but he hadn"t minded it as much as going back down into the cavern and starting another day of dismantling the pod. It was grueling labor, and they were working against the clock.

Come to think of it, though, there was no real need to rush. If they didn"t manage to remove everything worth saving from the pod by the time Yamanu arrived, they could ask him to stay a day or two longer until they were ready to bury the craft. He might not like it, but his preferences were a lesser concern than salvaging all they could.

"I hate this bloody wind." Dagor adjusted his scarf so it covered his mouth.

"Then you should be glad we are going down for another lovely day of hard labor in the cavern. There is no wind down there."

"Worth it," Dagor murmured from behind his scarf.

After checking the ropes and verifying that they were securely tied to the boulders, they grabbed one and rappelled down.

Two hours later, they had a pile of components nestled in the spots that the royals" stasis chambers had formerly occupied, but so far, they hadn"t found any hint of tampering or sabotage.

Dagor huffed out a breath. "We"re not going to find anything. We don"t have the right tools or the training. We are like kids trying to dismantle a toy to discover how it is made."

Aru chuckled. "Are there any toys like that left?"

"Yeah." Dagor sat on one of the stasis chambers. "The simple ones for babies."

Aru joined him on top of the next chamber. "We are lucky that our kids will be born on Earth. They will be able to take everything apart because almost nothing is built as a solid state."

"Give it time." Dagor sighed. "Someone soon will come up with the brilliant idea that this is the perfect method to prevent reverse engineering, and they will manufacture everything the way it is done on Anumati."

"Perhaps, but I don"t think it will happen anytime soon." Aru pushed to his feet. "I know it"s a long shot, but I"m hoping we will find something that will help us locate the other pods."

Dagor shook his head, his expression bleak. "What are the chances that there will be any survivors? The others are most likely dead, just like the ones we found here."

Even though the Kra-ell were not his people, Aru felt a pang of grief at the thought. These settlers had been young and hoped for a new beginning on Earth. Instead, they had forfeited their lives. He didn"t know whether to blame the queen of Anumati, the queen of the Kra-ell, or the Eternal King, but did it even matter?

It was always the commoners who paid with their lives for the games the elite played. The rulers, whether monarchs or democratically elected politicians, viewed the common people as a means to an end. That was even true of the queen of Anumati, whom he served.

She didn"t care about her grandchildren if they could not advance her agenda. The twins were as much Ahn"s kids as Annani was, and the same was true of Areana, but the queen only cared about Annani because she was the only legitimate heir to the Anumati throne.

"You are probably right," he told Dagor. "I doubt we will find any survivors, but I"m not ready to concede defeat until we find every pod. Perhaps some have miraculously survived."

Dagor"s expression was skeptical. "All the pods that still functioned have opened already, and their occupants are the pureblooded Kra-ells who are currently living in the village."

Igor had slaughtered most of the males and taken the females, but since then, more purebloods and hybrids had been born. Their community didn"t have enough genetic variety to sustain growth, but mating with humans was prolonging its survival.

"Mey and Jin"s parentage indicates otherwise," Aru said.

Dagor waved a dismissive hand. "A hybrid Kra-ell had a secret affair with a woman who he thought was human but who carried godly genes. It was a fluke, not proof that other Kra-ell survived. Igor didn"t find the other pods because their occupants never woke up from stasis, so their trackers couldn"t transmit a signal."

Aru rubbed a hand over his jaw. "We"ve talked about this. It"s possible that some of the pods had opened before Igor found a way to locate the signals from the implanted trackers, and they might have removed them."

Dagor sighed. "Let me remind you that the settlers didn"t know they had been implanted with trackers. Why would they even look for them? They couldn"t have removed what they hadn"t known existed."

Aru was not ready to give up. "They could have discovered it by accident. Maybe someone sought medical help and went through a scanner for some reason." He was clutching at straws, but the alternative was losing hope, and he wasn"t ready to do that. "It"s a flaw in the tracker"s design that they need a live host to transmit a signal. Otherwise, we could have found them even if the settlers removed them."

"It is a huge flaw," Dagor agreed. "If they transmitted a signal even when the bodies hosting them were dead or in stasis, we would have found them long ago. They were designed to use the host"s body for energy because they had to last for a very long time, and even now, we don"t have batteries that can last that long."

The truth was that Aru didn"t know if he should feel hopeful at the prospect of other Kra-ell surviving or dread it. After learning that there had been assassins planted among the settlers, perhaps it was better that they were all gone, especially now that the life of the heir to the throne was on the line.

"The upside of finding everyone in this pod dead is that it would be easy to convince the commander that there is no chance of anyone else surviving."

"But not everyone was dead," Dagor said. "The commander will want proof, and I"m not sure that our trickery with the heartbeats will convince him, especially since the Kra-ell bodies are well preserved and the royal twins look like corpses. The commander and whoever else looks at this will immediately realize why they don"t look the same."

"Not really. He knows that the royal twins are in one of the pods, but not this one specifically, and not that they are half-gods. It was only a rumor. He will be more inclined to believe that these two stasis chambers belonged to two unfortunate Kra-ell and that they malfunctioned before the others. With how emaciated the twins are, it"s impossible to tell they are not purely Kra-ell."

Dagor regarded him with an amused smile. "That doesn"t make any sense, Aru. The pod runs all the stasis chambers. There is no reason for one to malfunction before the others."

"Right." Aru rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "I don"t know enough about how these things work. Maybe we will have to stage something. We can"t let the Eternal King find out that the twins are alive. We need to make a convincing case for them being dead."

He would have to pose the question to his sister and let the queen decide what to do about reporting the finding of the twins.

Dagor groaned. "We should just fake our own deaths like Kian suggested and be done with it. If we are presumed dead, we can"t tell them anything, right?"

"The Eternal King will just send another team. The only way to prevent it is to pretend that we are still searching for clues about the Kra-ell and drag it out for as long as possible."

Dagor tilted his head. "If we don"t want to find the other pods, then why are we going to all the trouble of dismantling components from the pods in the hopes of finding clues about their locations?"

Aru shrugged. "I want to find them, but that doesn"t mean we need to report everything we find to the commander."