Chapter 2

TWO

Oh my stars, what was that ?

Jade promptly flopped back down on the bed.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, hoping to hell and back that the alien in her dreams really was just that.

A dream.

I've been asleep this entire time, right?

Because if he wasn't a figment of her imagination— as he himself had said —then she was in a whole lot of trouble.

Come on… come on. Just go to sleep, damn it.

But her mind was buzzing.

She couldn't shake off the feeling that she'd just encountered something mythical and powerful and forbidden.

Dragek.

He'd inserted himself into her consciousness with effortless arrogance as if he ruled her dreams.

She'd dreamed of people before: of strangers and objects of desire, figments of her subconscious that were so intense she felt as if she'd known them for a lifetime.

Sometimes, when she woke up, she felt like she'd lost something profound.

She'd been having these crazy, vivid dreams ever since the accident. Normally, sleep was elusive. Most of the time, insomnia was her companion, but when she did manage to fall asleep, she would slumber so deeply that even the loudest disturbance couldn't wake her.

Once, when she was visiting the northern tropical city of Darwin, she'd slept through a cyclone, waking to find the trees outside stripped bare of their leaves as the morning sun rose above the eerily calm aftermath while ominous grey clouds and monsoonal rains loomed darkly in the far-off distance.

Oh well, he's just another figment of your imagination.

She would ignore him just like she'd ignored all the other voices that had spoken in her head since the injury.

The real voices.

Those stupid voices were the reason she was here, hiding out in an underground dwelling in the abandoned town of Coober Pedy. The Federation's Healthy Mind and Wellbeing Agency, the MWA, was after her, and this was the only place on Earth she could think of where she could lay low for a while and buy herself some time while she figured out her next move.

Apart from a couple of old, crusty, cantankerous individuals—hold-outs who wouldn't ever sell her out to the government—the town was completely deserted. The opals had been mined out long ago, leaving the sun-blasted earth scarred and pockmarked with mineshafts and craters.

Well, nearly all the opals were gone.

Jade knew of a few secret pockets where, with a little skill and knowledge, one could unearth the most precious gems. Just the other day, she'd found a five-carat red opal. Polishing had revealed brilliant fiery shades of crimson.

It was a high-grade opal, extremely rare and valuable. In the past few years, demand for Earth-origin gems had soared, thanks to alien buyers.

Apparently, opal didn't exist on any other planet in the Universe.

If she found the right buyer, she could get good money for it—not enough to get her out of this predicament, but enough to sustain her here for some time… until she figured out her next move.

She'd already removed her tracking implant—cut it out with a store-bought scalpel; it had hurt like a bitch even though she'd used numbing cream—but if she ventured anywhere too public, there was always a chance they would identify her on the body recognition surveillance systems.

She'd initially thought of escaping off-planet, but now that the Kordolians had taken control of Earth's orbit, that possibility was looking more and more remote.

Especially if they were anything like him.

Dragek.

Are you real?

If Kordolians were taking over, there was no way she was getting off this planet. Out there, in the cold void of space, how could anyone—especially a human— possibly survive?

She'd have to look at other options. Underground surgery was a possibility. Get them to change her face, her eyes, her voice, her gait, her fingerprints… until the AI no longer recognized her.

She would have to get a new name, too. A new bio-sig. A whole new identity.

She would have to find the right people: biohackers and tech people who did this sort of thing. She'd have to go to Darkside.

All of that would be terribly expensive.

She had no funds to speak of. She was cut off from her family and from her husband of two years.

Bloody Cameron. He was the one who'd pushed for her to undergo the neurotransmitter and receptor modification procedure, otherwise known as NERM.

They all thought she was in the grip of psychosis.

According to everyone else, the voices were just hallucinations. She couldn't possibly be hearing real voices.

But then… to the surprise of her treating team, the meds didn't work, and the NERM didn't work, and the voices kept flooding in, and they were even louder than before, and once, when she'd tried to talk to them, they'd talked back.

That had freaked her out more than a little.

Treatment-Resistant Psychosis, Not Otherwise Specified, they called it. That was her official diagnosis, anyway.

Translation: they had no idea what was going on. Apparently, her brain activity scans were highly unusual.

But out here, in the middle of the desert, she didn't have to worry about the voices because there was almost nobody around.

When she moved away from populated areas, the voices went away.

Funny, that.

At least here, she didn't have to worry about her husband—well, ex- husband apart from on paper—who'd been trying to get her committed to the Wellmind Institute for the past six months.

Wellmind was a last resort. Only the most difficult cases were admitted there.

Cameron had already frozen her accounts, but unless she was officially declared mentally incapacitated by the MWA, he couldn't access her credits.

She'd escaped before they could legally determine that she was incapacitated. Besides, she wasn't. Cognitively, she was intact. She could research, strategize, and execute a plan. She knew exactly what was going on around her.

With nothing but a few unmarked credit chips and a backpack full of clothes and a hat and a mask and sunnies to conceal her face, she'd fled Sydney by airborne taxi, getting off in Canberra, then taking the most circuitous overland route to this underground bolt-hole.

She'd gone on foot. Then by electric scooter and hover-bike, staying at a pod-motel, using her credit chips to buy meals and drinks from retail-bots and vending-drones along the way.

She'd hitched rides on produce transports and mining rigs. The bloke who'd dropped her off in Coober Pedy had been in a rush to get to Teluria. Something about delivering his cargo, then getting back home—which had an underground bunker, from the sounds of it—before everything went to shit.

It wasn't unusual to hear people talking like that these days.

She'd been catching snippets of doomsday panic from people ever since the dark ships first appeared in Earth's atmosphere.

The rumor going around was that the Kordolians were finally going to take over Earth. To "officially" invade.

"About bloody time," Jade muttered wryly, rolling off the bed in frustration. There was no way she could sleep now. She'd just take a dissolvable neuranol and try to calm the fuck down.

In her silent underground home, which had been passed down through her family for generations, she felt restless…

And desperately lonely.

There was nobody she could reach out to. Any contact with family or friends would risk her location being pinpointed by the Federation.

All she could do was keep going down into the mines, searching for the rich veins of opal that might lead to the motherlode. Thankfully, the mining robot was still here. It had helped her a lot.

There had to be more opals where that quality red specimen had come from. All she needed was one big one.

She'd find a buyer, get her money, get her body biohacked, and disappear.

Away from her once-besotted husband. Away from the MWA and the Federation's digital eyes. She'd find somewhere remote and secluded, where people's voices wouldn't invade her mind.

Even him ?

No. She had no doubt that if he wanted to walk through her dreams again, there was nothing she could do about it.