convinced she’s telling the truth. I don’t know why exactly. She just seems so over the whole thing, it’s hard to believe that she’s dissembling. Besides, her heart rate is steady. Her voice isn’t fluctuating. If she’s lying, then we really are fucked because the Faida would be just about the best manipulators I’ve ever come into contact with, and that includes the altered Roones.
“We can get into the specifics another time, when you’ve rested and seen to your wounds,” Arif says dismissively.
“Oh, I don’t think so, buddy.” I keep my eyes level and my head, even though it’s aching fiercely, perfectly level as well. “Time is a precious commodity around these parts, and trust is even harder to come by. I’d like to know what exactly you were doing on the Spiradael Earth and if that’s a problem for you, well, we can always leave you here and come back when you feel like talking and I’ve gotten some rest.”
“No, no,” Arif says quickly, but the woman who’d spoken up earlier is now barking at him in Faida. He responds quickly in return and they have a heated but short exchange that ends with her throwing up her hands and repeating a word that sounds like singshe three or four times. I don’t speak Faida but I’m fairly sure by the tone that this must mean fine or possibly whatever. Arif turns back around to face me.
“I understand.” Arif nods tersely. “And I agree. Time is precious and our history is long and complicated. That is all I was trying to relay to you. I assumed that it was enough, for now, that we fought side by side. Clearly I was wrong.” Arif sighs. He wants to go. I want to go, too, but ignorance is a trap that I won’t step into willingly.
“You know, every Citadel race begins with a lie,” he says thoughtfully. “Some are more elaborate than others. For us, they opened our Rifts by feeding scientific data to one of our most well-respected scientists. The Settiku Hesh came much later, but they did come.”
“That’s what happened on our Earth,” I say quickly, wanting him to get to the Spiradael part.
“At first, it was all quite marvelous. We did not hide the Rifts from the public at large. Instead, they were celebrated,” he says, “as scientific marvels. The Faida currently live in an era of peace and prosperity. We were born to take to the skies and we have done that, too. We have visited other planets, met other life-forms. You must understand, then, that when the Settiku Hesh finally did come, the Roones’ offer of help was not so alien—they did not seem so alien … to us.”
I try not to let that comment throw me. It’s not so much that they’ve been to space, or live in space or whatever, but how does a Star Trek society find itself at the mercy of the altered Roones? What chance do we mere humans (who are basically, globally, assholes to one another) have? “So let me get this straight. You volunteered to become Citadels?” I ask, deliberately keeping my face neutral.
“They came through the Rift, like every other species. The aid they offered was simply too good to pass up. We were being slaughtered by the Settiku Hesh,” Arif says bitterly. “It wasn’t just soldiers who volunteered, but doctors, scientists, journalists. Our Citadels came from every background imaginable. It was encouraged. Perhaps if the altered Roones had made the changes conditional for only military personnel, then we might have been more suspicious. But still, even though we all had many different professions, as Citadels we became a paramilitary organization. They said it was to defend ourselves, which seemed reasonable.
“We believed so many of their lies.”
“So what changed? Why was there dissension among your ranks?” I ask, all the while noting his body language, checking for any possible sign, however slight, that he is lying.
“It took years for us to catch on, such is the mastery of our enemy. The first hint that something was wrong was when we started a task force to investigate the relentlessness of the Karekins. Of course, we know now they weren’t Karekins at all, but Settiku Hesh,” Arif explains calmly, slowly as if I wouldn’t get it. I find this tedious and I don’t bother to hide it. “But it was their obsession with the Kir-Abisat that spurred us to action.”
“The Kir-Abisat?” I ask, though I think I already know the answer to that one. I think whatever this Kir-Abisat thing is, I have it, too.
“The Kir-Abisat is a mutation of the genome. It allows a Citadel to open a Rift using only the sound of their own voice when matched with the frequency of a conduit, someone from the Earth they are trying to access.”
I narrow my eyes. My mind begins to scramble. Can this be true? No. No way. “So it’s not just, like, a sound coming from a person that’s not on their own Earth?” I throw out as casually as I can.
Arif looks me up and down, as if he is seeing me in an entirely different light. “It begins that way, but it is much, much more.”
I knew that Levi was listening from a distance. He didn’t need to be beside me, not with our enhanced hearing to catch these words. Now, he moves up next to me. He folds his arms.
“But they did this, right?” he asks, fishing for more information. “They gave you this extra gene or whatever? If things were so transparent between you all, didn’t you notice this particular enhancement?”
Arif huffs and shakes his head. “They said they did not. They claimed that it was a by-product of Rifting itself. We’ve been going through the Rifts for almost a decade. That explanation was plausible, at first.”
“Okay, well,” I say impatiently. “That still doesn’t tell me why you all were there, on the Spiradael Earth. How did it get from a suspicion to covert ops?”
“A few of us did not like how they attempted to isolate every Kir-Abisat. So we stole information, the private encrypted files of a few of the altered Roones. And then, we learned the truth about all the other Citadel races, that they were indeed responsible for the Kir-Abisat gene and the Midnight Protocol—the switch the Roones have that can kill us all. We tried talking. We tried negotiations, but all the while, we were preparing, as any good soldier would do, for the worst-case scenario. And that’s why we were on the Spiradael Earth.”
“I still don’t get it,” I say, throwing my hands up in frustration. “Why were you fighting among yourselves? You’re this progressive, open society with spaceships. You find out that the altered Roones have been lying to you—that they’re a threat to your safety—so who is going to be on their side?”
Arif looks down at his worn leather boots. He puts both hands on his hips as if this is a puzzle that he, too, doesn’t know how to put together. “They were using drugs to make us more compliant for one, and for another, many—too many Faida Citadels, unfortunately—believed that it did not matter. Whatever they did, whatever lies they told were insignificant in the face of being able to navigate the Rifts.”
“How did they trap you? Why didn’t your QOINS system work anymore?” Levi asks quietly. There is an edge to his voice. He is being guarded, with damn good reason.
“I believe I can answer that,” the same elfin platinum-haired Faida volunteers. “They must have caught on. The altered Roones must have figured out that we were sending scouting parties out. Every QOINS system is built differently. Or rather, they improve it, upgrade it with each species. They did not know where or when we were going out, so they simply went to every Earth with a Citadel faction and sent out a signal that would blow our specific QOINS device. It’s a relatively easy fix and, even better, a deterrent, I imagine, from sending out further assets.”
At this, Levi
