Page 18 of I Married Amreth

“Good!” he said, getting on his feet when we all nodded in response. “Meals will be served in the green house at 1:00 and then at 6:00. If you require sustenance earlier, simply warn the guard. His name is Enre. There will always be things to munch on in that same dwelling. May your day be productive.”

With that, he got up and walked out of the deployable building.

“What the fuck was that?!” I whispered as I watched the door close behind him.

“That was our grumpy host, Kald Aku Ebaki,” Mehreen said with a long-suffering sigh. “But it was about time you stopped napping and joined the fun.”

“How long was I out? And how long have you guys been here?” I asked.

“We all arrived here two days ago,” Ernst replied. “Mehreen and I started going through the files yesterday. This entire thing is an epic clusterfuck.”

“Yesterday?! Why was I not awakened?” I exclaimed.

“You sustained some grievous injuries on the Gladius,” Mehreen explained. “Your nanobots have been working overtime getting you back to 100%.”

“But I was fine when I first woke up before arriving here,” I argued.

She shook her head. “You were only partially mended and enjoying the effects of some pretty incredible painkillers. You would have hated being up and about yesterday.”

“I see. But what of you two? Are you okay?”

They both nodded.

“We’ve been treated very well,” Ernst said. “No one has threatened or tried to harm us. Our dwellings are clean and comfortable, and they provide us with plenty of food.”

“That’s good to hear. But are you suffering from any type of memory loss?” I asked.

Once again, they both nodded.

“They wiped our memories,” Mehreen said firmly. “There was someone with Aku on that ship, but I can’t remember who they were, what they looked like, or even what type of vessel we traveled in.”

“Same,” I replied with a sliver of frustration.

“But why?” Ernst asked.

“For the same reason that they won’t tell us where they got this lab. Whoever is helping them would get in deep trouble,” I said pensively. “As much as I wish he would open up about them, Aku is right that this is not relevant to our current purpose. But those accusations against Elias are wild.”

“Wild but true,” Ernst said with an air of disgust.

“What?!” I asked, stunned by the depth of contempt I could read on his features.

“I’ve worked with Jacobs. That man is as foul as he is ruthless. Based on my experience with Elias, everything that Aku said sounds probable. That’s why I left his team. That wretch is a leech. He passes off his interns’ work as his own. What most people fail to realize is that SS12 saved his career. He was about to lose his funding. And with so many people refusing to work with him, he was getting desperate.”

“What are you saying? You think this entire tragedy was caused deliberately? Are you accusing him of foul play?”

My stomach dropped when he hesitated. It struck me hard to see someone I held in such high esteem turn out to be nothing like the idealized image I built up in my head.

“No,” he said at last. “I doubt he would have provoked something like this on purpose. For all his faults, Jacobs is an opportunist, not an evil mastermind. He has just grown increasingly lazy with protocols, and that has trickled down to the members of his team. When we leave this planet after resolving this crisis, you realize that we’re going to walk into a major shitshow, right?”

“Whenwe leave, orifwe leave?” Mehreen countered.

I frowned as I studied her face. “Why do you say that? You think they will harm us once they’ve gotten what they wanted?”

She shook her head. “I have sensed no malice from these people. So I don’t think they will try to hurt us, but I believe they will want to keep us.”

“Whatever for? You heard him clearly expressed that he cannot wait for us to be gone,” I argued.

“He did,” she conceded. “But they’ve also seen how the disease came back two years after Jacobs initially cured it. Their people are on the verge of extinction. In their shoes, I wouldn’t be too swift about allowing the only people able to fix it to leave, especially since they have no direct way of communicating with us if anything else happens.

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