Page 31 of Soros
I smiled a little. “He’s badass. But the team was already missing a member and now they’re down to seven soldiers. Captain Lios is under pressure. He needs three new soldiers and he said that he’s eager to get more females and another pilot.”
“Then ask Nerix to bring in his cousin. She’s a great pilot and I think she would join the team in a heartbeat. Her name is Cacala.”
“Cacala,” I said the name slowly. “I’ll try to remember.”
“Good. I want to say that it was nice catching up with you, Tania, but I wish you had better news,” Malliko said.
“I’m sorry. We’ve all been grieving as well. I didn’t know Keindra well, but Ziba made a big impression on me. She was extremely kind to Jade and me.”
“Yeah, Ziba was kind to everyone.” Malliko gave a sad sigh. “I’ll reach out to Lios and offer my help.”
“Alright. Let’s stay in touch. I’m not sure how long I need to stay in New York, but I’ll let you know.”
“Take care,” Clara said, “And Star, you have our sympathy. We can only imagine how hard it must be to lose your entire family and start all over on an entirely different planet. I thought moving to a new city was lonely.”
“Star isn’t alone,” I assured both Star and them. “We’ll figure this out together.”
“Yes, of course, we’re here if you need anything.”
“Just keep my plants alive until you leave.”
“And then?” Clara asked. “If you have to stay in New York longer, what do you do then?”
I sighed. “Then I would have to ask my mom to help me, but I’d rather not. She’s not doing too well.”
Ending the call with Malliko and Clara, I called my mom to tell her that I was alright. The call didn’t go through, and it made me think that she had failed to pay her phone bill again. It was one more thing I would have to deal with when all of this was over.
CHAPTER 12
Chasing Ko’roz
Soros
Eight hours after Captain Lios received the lead on Ko’roz, we still hadn’t found Ziba’s killer. I was hungry, annoyed, and exhausted from a lack of sleep. It also frustrated me how Nerix and Lios were looking at me and asking questions as if I were a psychic who was able to predict where Ko’roz would hide.
My uncertainty grew for every hour that passed without results. Maybe Ko’roz wasn’t on Earth. And even if he was, the chances that he would be in this town were minuscule. It was all guesswork from my side based on my analysis of his personality.
The local police force that we worked with believed that Lios, Nerix, and I were foreign agents searching for a particularly dangerous criminal on the run. We drove around New York City with two detectives who introduced themselves as Sanchez and Lee. Sanchez was tall for a human woman and told us she had been a Marine before she joined the police force. Lee was a bit shorter than her and slim despite the fact that he ate whenever we were driving somewhere. Some of the things he ate smelled peculiar and made me nauseated.
The lead we were investigating had come from a shop assistant who reported that she had been hypnotized by a tall man who had tricked her and gotten away with expensive name-brand items of clothing worth thousands of dollars. Since we got the lead at three in the morning, the store was closed, the shop assistant unavailable, and any surveillance footage not yet handed over to the authorities.
We asked Lee and Sanchez to go over any other reports in the last few days on people getting hypnotized by a large male. Turned out that there had been two other cases reported. One was from a young woman who had met a large, middle-aged man on the street. She wasn’t aware how it happened, but somehow, she ended up bringing him back to her house where he slept for a few nights. She remembered cooking for him and pampering him, but her mind was in a haze. Only when her boyfriend showed up and found the strange man sleeping in her bed did the young woman snap out of the trance she had been in. By then, she had been missing work for two days. The boyfriend called the police but before two officers arrived, the stranger had left the apartment.
In the other incident, a restaurant owner reported how one of his servers had been tricked into thinking he had already received payment for the food that was served to a large man.
All three cases sounded like it could be Ko’roz and so we had spent the night searching the neighborhoods where he had last been seen, and walking into bars, hoping to see a giant trying to make new friends.
In the morning, we went and interviewed the shopkeeper and the woman with the unwanted house guest. Unfortunately, the surveillance video from the shop didn’t show the thief’s face and so it was impossible to say how he looked exactly. Both women seemed trustworthy and genuine, which gave me hope that we were on the track of Ko’roz.
But then we heard from Zobran and the others in London and they too had found potential evidence of Ko’roz. A large man had made a scene at a restaurant where he refused to pay for his food. He had accused the waiter of being a small-minded weak human. I argued that Ko’roz wouldn’t have made a spectacle but rather used mind clouding to get his way. We all agreed, however, that it was a strange thing for a human to say and so the chance that it might have been Ko’roz was definitely there.
All the time, the voice in the back of my mind grew in volume as I kept telling myself how unlikely it was that I could guess where a sick individual like Ko’roz would flee to. Although my gut feeling had been true at other times, I hated that my reasons for picking Earth were based partly on assumption and not on real evidence. Once again, I checked in with my colleagues at Tandaquon, telepathically asking if they had mapped Ko’roz’s whereabouts and found the pilot whom he had paid to take him off the planet.
Now that we knew Jade had been kidnapped from Earth several times, it was safe to conclude that the group of criminals that Ko’roz was involved with had somehow found a way to land on Earth undetected. It was possible that they had discovered a way to outsmart the surveillance team that protected humans and Earth from outsiders. My best guess, however, was that they had an insider whom they paid off to let them through. But it was merely an assumption.
Guessing that Ko’roz would choose a metropolitan area was simply based on the logic that he would stand out too much in a small or rural town, and that masses of people provided anonymity. As a politician back on Markatoria, Ko’roz was used to influence and status. With him being mentally superior to humans, it was hard to imagine his ambitions not getting the better of him. He might have arrived thinking that he would keep a low profile for a while, but I had studied everything I could about him and Ko’roz was a narcissist with a flamboyant personality. I would bet my position that he couldn’t play small even if his life depended on it.
The sun was high in the sky, and Sanchez and Lee were ready to end their shift, when a call finally came in. A worried neighbor living in a nice neighborhood reported that a strange man had moved into her older neighbor’s house. The description of the man was sparse, but the words “tall and in his early to mid-forties” could fit Ko’roz.
