Tabitha Chirrick - Overshadowed

“You didn’t go with him?” Fehn asked.

Shy did something Tayel didn’t think the other woman capable of doing: she blushed.

“My brother is sort of — he is very good at getting people to stay put,” Shy stammered. “He left me in the charge of his personal guards, and changed the codes on my door.

“He came back twenty minutes later, just as the alarms started going off. I had no idea what was happening. I asked him countless questions but he didn’t answer one. In fact, he told me to stop asking questions — of him, and of father. He told me he was leaving and that it was too dangerous to go with him. Father would keep me out of harm so long as I stayed out of the way, Locke said.”

“Alarms and guards,” Fehn murmured.

“What is it?” Tayel asked.

He shook his head.

Shy watched him for a moment, but when he didn’t add comment she said, “Looking back, I can’t believe I let him get away, but I still had one thing going for me. My brother — for all his wit — has never been very aware whilst in a hurry. He missed me removing his journal from his bag while he packed.”

“A journal?” Tayel asked.

“Yeah. A journal.”

“Like, a hard drive? Or a computer?”

Shy lifted a book from the space behind her and wiggled it in the air.

“I skimmed it right after he’d gone. It didn’t take long for me to understand things looked bad, and that Locke was in danger. He’d been researching my father’s activities for a while. I can’t imagine what he finally saw to make him take off like he did, but at the time, all I knew was I had to leave, too. I packed the essentials, went to the hangar, found my ship, and took off for Modnik. My brother mentioned the planet constantly in his findings, so of course that’s where he’d go. Everything would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the fleet in orbit.”

Tayel almost fell out of her seat, she was leaning so far forward. “A fleet?”

“I escaped thanks to a cloaking device onboard, but not without damage. Some fighter managed to knock out my FTL drive, leaving me to rely on fuel. Needless to say, I couldn’t make it all the way to Modnik.”

“That’s why you landed here, on Elsha,” Tayel said.

“Yes, but the story would have ended there if it wasn’t for your friend.” She nodded to Fehn.

He stiffened.

“What do you mean?” Tayel asked.

“I’ll go into details later, if you really want them. For now, just understand that if it wasn’t for him, my ship would be confiscated and none of us would have any chance of getting off this planet.”

Tayel resisted the urge to stare Fehn down. She knew he and Shy were connected somehow. She cycled through a couple different questions to ask, but Jace spoke first.

“Why Modnik?”

Shy flipped to a page in her brother’s journal and passed it across to Jace, who took it after a few seconds of hesitation. “He has a contact there. Every piece of writing in that book is either the contact’s or my brother’s. I had time to read almost all of it since I landed here. This contact had well-researched intel. Shapeshifter sightings, details on some Varg election… He wrote about brainwashed raiders, people taking over the council government, and that alien race I mentioned earlier. That’s where I got the idea from. If anything, he seems to have gotten the raiders right, because trust me, they aren’t behind all this.”

“Why did they use such primitive communication?” Jace asked. He set the book beside him, and Tayel picked it up.

“Increased security is my best guess. It’s hard to hack a piece of paper.”

Tayel flipped to a page and read a few lines. Odd happenings. Late meetings into the night. Everything Shy mentioned rested on these pages. Tayel stopped on a phrase.

They come through portals black and wavering.

Black, wavering portals. A dull ache settled in the back of her head. Two weeks ago, Mom’s hand in her own, fear ate at her resolve every time she saw those dark, shimmering ovals tucked away on street corners, storefronts, and hazy alleys. She read faster.

They come through quickly, before the window to another world snaps shut. They look like any one of us. Like a Varg, or a human, or an Argel. But, Locke, you know as well as I that they are not us. They wear our skin and speak our tongue, but tossed aside legends of old hold the truth which has been kept secret. These beings — these shapeshifters — are Rokkir.

“Tayel.”

“Huh?”

“See anything interesting?” Shy asked.

“Yeah,” Tayel said. “ Rokkir. ”

“Ah, yes. Rokkir is what they call the shapeshifters. That’s what I’ve been building up to. This war couldn’t have been started by the raiders. It had to be them — the Rokkir.”

Tayel tried to swallow, but her mouth had run dry.

“Right.” Fehn walked over and snatched the book out of Tayel’s hands. “No offense, but that’s ridiculous.”

“I know it sounds unlikely, but you have to trust me. All the evidence my brother found points to it.”

“There’s no proof here,” Fehn said, flipping through the old pages. “Just ramblings.”

“That’s all I saw, too,” said Jace. “Besides, if it had any merit, this would’ve be taken to the authorities and they’d have dealt with it.”

Shy rolled her eyes and sighed. “No, see, you weren’t listening. These Rokkir are taking over the government. Locke and his contact mentioned officials going missing and then reappearing as though nothing happened. They wrote about secret meetings, strange behavior — all of it! It’s all there. The council has been taken over.”

“I believe you,” Tayel said.

“What?” Jace gave her a look like she’d grown a second head.

“One of the notes Locke’s contact wrote mentioned dark portals. Don’t you remember? That’s what started this whole mess: the black portal we found at Sif Field.”

“Those could have been anything, Tayel. Does that really justify a jump to believing in shapeshifters?”

Tayel hissed through her teeth. The journal, Shy’s story, Shy’s sincerity — it all had the sensation of being real. It was an instinctual draw, a gut reaction.

“It’s a wild theory,” Fehn said. “That’s all.”

“Listen,” Shy said, “I know all of this seems farfetched. I’ve been dreading trying to convince anyone, but I trust my brother. His words are the only clues I have.”

Jace and Fehn weren’t going along with any of this. Tayel was suffering her own internal battle between believing it and not, but what they all needed was a strong dosage of facts.

“Shy, what do you need from us? Why did you bring us here in the first place?” she asked.

“I need fuel,” Shy said. “Bear with me. There are fuel tanks just inside the forest, a little ways behind the docks. Workers haven’t been locking the valves for whatever reason — I don’t know, maybe the need for constant use and their assumption that no one is going to steal it — it doesn’t matter. I’ve checked, and they’re not locked.

“With as much fuel as they’ve been using, they won’t notice if a little bit each day goes missing. My ship is a small class transport, and doesn’t need much. One barrel a day and it will take a week, tops. What I need help with is taking the fuel to my ship. I parked it in the forest a few miles uphill behind the fuel station, and there’s no way I can roll a full barrel of fuel up the mountain by myself.”

“So stealing,” Jace said.

The dull ache in Tayel’s skull turned into full blown pounding. Her foot tapped a beat of its own accord. She wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. Jace wasn’t wrong. What Shy was asking them to do was illegal, yet Tayel still considered it a viable option. Get fuel, leave Elsha, find Jace’s parents, and then find a way to stop the invaders — whoever they were. In that moment, it wasn’t unattainable.