His mother’s face hardened. Nodding, she crossed to her husband and wrapped her arms around him. “Wipe it clean. They don’t deserve to live if they’ve harmed our baby. If she went there, she went in peace to offer them an alliance and to warn them of the threat the Gathendiens pose. She wanted to help them. To save them. If they hurt her, they deserve whatever punishment you deliver.”
Duras stepped forward. “I’m going with you.”
Gefen and Levik echoed the sentiment.
“No, you aren’t,” Taelon countered. “Right now we are the only ones aside from my source who know about this, and I trust him to keep his silence. If most of the royal family suddenly departs with the entire armada in tow, it will raise questions and leave the planet vulnerable to attack from enemies who have been banned from the alliance. I’ll go alone”—he held up a hand when protests erupted—“with a Yona guard. And I’ll rendezvous with Janwar.”
“Who is Janwar?” his mother asked.
“My source. I’ll pore over all of his intel, then decide what approach to take to locate Amiriska or—if the worst has happened—to learn who is responsible for her death. It will take me thirteen months to reach Earth. I’ll have Janwar continue to hunt down information while I travel. And while we take care of that, Father, you can begin drafting battle plans. As soon as I know without a doubt what happened to her, I will contact you and you can determine what action to take. Do not send battleships after me until then. We don’t want our enemies to learn Amiriska is on Earth, or they may reach her before I can find her.”
His mother looked up at her husband. “Are there no alliance members closer to Earth?”
He shook his head. “The cost to travel that distance discourages trade. And the inhabited planets closer to Earth’s solar system bear similarly primitive societies.”
“The Segonians have a base about halfway between Lasara and Earth,” Taelon mentioned. “But it’s still under construction. They aren’t yet equipped to perform search-and-rescue missions.” Which left him.
He glanced at his brothers. All were thinking what he was: the Earthlings who had captured their sister would have her for at least one Earth year before he could reach her. All feared what she would suffer during that time. All feared what she had already suffered… if she still lived. “If they’ve harmed Amiriska,” he vowed, “they will be punished.”
His father nodded. “They will be punished.”
Chapter One
Texas
Lisa Holt stuffed her binder and heavy Biology II book into her backpack and rose.
“See you in sociology,” Vanessa said as she passed.
Lisa smiled. “See you there.” As she strode up the aisle of desks, she glanced at her professor. A couple of students chatted with him. Lisa held back until they were finished and let them pass. “Hi, Dr. Aguera.”
“Hi, Lisa,” he replied with a smile. “How are you? Hanging in there?”
She nodded. Dr. Aguera was her favorite professor. Not for the reason some of her female classmates loved him—because he was tall, handsome, and in his thirties. Lisa had just found him to be a very nice person. And, more than any of her other professors, he had really helped her after her father’s unexpected death. “I wondered if you’d glance at some of these and tell me what you think?” She held up a handful of flyers.
“Sure.”
Leaning back against his desk, he took the pages and began to peruse them.
Lisa waited patiently. Though Dr. Aguera was not her assigned academic advisor, he was the one she had turned to when the world had crashed down around her and she’d had to drop out of school last year. Unlike the friends she’d had in high school, Lisa hadn’t been able to leap right into college after graduation. Her mother had needed her too much after her cancer diagnosis, as had her father. The college fund her parents had spent years scrimping and saving and accumulating had instead gone toward covering high insurance deductibles, travel costs for treatments, medications and fees insurance wouldn’t cover, and the loss of her mother’s income. Her father had worked two jobs while Lisa stayed home and cared for her mom. She worked part-time at a bookstore to help make ends meet and to try to reduce the debt her parents were steadily racking up as her mother’s long battle continued. A battle she had ultimately lost after six years.
Lisa’s father had fallen apart. He had loved her mother dearly and couldn’t forgive himself for not being with her when his wife had died. Both he and Lisa had thought there would be more time, so he had been at work, struggling to avoid bankruptcy. The fact that he had not been with the woman he loved during her final moments had utterly crushed him.
Lisa had suppressed her own grief and done what she could to help him. She continued to work even while she started college on a partial scholarship. But her father never recovered. A year ago, halfway through her freshman year, a car accident had taken him from her, too. He’d been driving drunk. The other accident victim had survived with thankfully minor injuries. But lawyers and insurance companies had swooped in and taken everything, as had the hospitals still awaiting outstanding payments.
Lisa had spent the past year trying to get back on her feet. Dr. Aguera had been her lifeline here on campus, ensuring her other professors dropped her from their classes instead of failing her when she’d suddenly found herself without a home or a job and no way to attend classes shortly before finals. Once she’d found a full-time job at an all-night Superstore and rented a crappy apartment, he’d helped her apply for grants and scholarships so she could resume taking classes.
“I would avoid this one,” he murmured, handing back one of the flyers. “They’re being too cagey on the details.”
“Okay.”
He’d also tipped her off to alternative ways to earn a little extra money on the side. He’d had to work his way through grad school. And one way he’d made ends meet was by participating in clinical studies various medical groups advertised on the science building’s noticeboard.
Lisa hadn’t even thought of that, nor had she paid attention to the notices, assuming they were mostly students looking for roommates or frat-party announcements. But there were also, she discovered, calls for paid volunteers for studies, just as Dr. Aguera had said. So far she had been paid to participate in several. Her favorites had been a cholesterol study and a blood pressure study. Both had paid her for participating and supplied all her meals, so it had been a win-win… and the first time since her father’s death that she had been able to eat three meals a day. She’d also participated in a study researching whether or not arnica gel could decrease muscle soreness after exercise in comparison to a placebo. That one had been easy peasy. So had another on the effect of Concord-grape-juice consumption on cognitive function. The one on the effects of grape supplementation on physical endurance had probably been her least favorite.
When Dr. Aguera had mentioned participating in studies, he had also encouraged her to let him look them over first so he could warn her away from any that might be too risky. “My wife—then fiancée—freaked out my first year of grad school when I participated in a trial for a sleep aid that gave me such horrific, vivid nightmares that I woke up screaming once or twice per night,” he had confided. So she had shown him every prospective flyer that caught her eye.