Metamorphosis (The Two Moons of Rehnor, Book 7)

  The Two Moons of Rehnor

  Book 7

  Metamorphosis

  By

  J. Naomi Ay

  Published by Ayzenberg, Inc.

  Copyright 2012-2016 Ayzenberg, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  180116

  Cover Design by Amy Jambor

  Photo credits: curaphotography/Bigstock.com

  Agsandrew/Bigstock.com

  Also by J. Naomi Ay

  The Two Moons of Rehnor series

  The Boy who Lit up the Sky (Book 1)

  My Enemy's Son (Book 2)

  Of Blood and Angels (Book 3)

  Firestone Rings (Book 4)

  The Days of the Golden Moons (Book 5)

  Golden's Quest (Book 6)

  Metamorphosis (Book 7)

  The Choice (Book 8)

  Treasure Hunt (Book 9)

  Space Chase (Book 10)

  Imperial Masquerade (Book 11)

  Rivalry (Book 12)

  Thirteen (Book 13)

  Betrayal (Book 14)

  Fairy Tales (Book 15)

  Gone for a Spin (Book 16)

  The Firesetter series

  A Thread of Time

  Amyr’s Command

  Three Kings

  Exceeding Expectations

  To Rachel

  Who loves red bowties and fluffy black dogs.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - Katie

  Chapter 2 - Taner

  Chapter 3 - Zork

  Chapter 4 - Berkan

  Chapter 5 - Katie

  Chapter 6 - Joanne

  Chapter 7 - Taner

  Chapter 8 - Joanne

  Chapter 9 - Berkan

  Chapter 10 - Katie

  Chapter 11 - Zork

  Chapter 12 - Taner

  Chapter 13 - Berkan

  Chapter 14 - Katie

  Chapter 15 - Joanne

  Chapter 16 - Zork

  Chapter 17 - Berkan

  Chapter 18 - Taner

  Chapter 19 - Zork

  Chapter 20 - Joanne

  Chapter 21 - Taner

  Chapter 22 - Berkan

  Chapter 23 - Katie

  Chapter 1

  Katie

  "What if we went on a real vacation?" I suggested. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head a little. "I mean it," I continued. "What if we went someplace where nobody knew us? We need some time for just us. No security, no retainers, no friends. Nobody. Just you and me. What do you think?" He didn't respond. Instead, he took a long drag on his cigarette, studying me from behind his dark glasses. "Nothing is going to happen if you're not here for a few weeks. The Empire isn't going to fall apart. You're not getting any younger, you know. If you don't take a vacation, you may end up dying years earlier and then where is the Empire going to be?"

  "That's a pleasant thought," he said. "Thank you for that."

  I stood up and made to take his empty breakfast plate from the table but then just sat back down.

  "I need a change," I declared as tears pricked at my eyes. This growing old business was a total crock.

  He sighed heavily, indicating that I was annoying him.

  "I don't know who I am anymore." I wiped my nose with a napkin.

  "You never did."

  "That's not funny."

  "It wasn't meant to be." He took another long drag on his cig and glanced at the morning news on his tablet. Obviously, my heart felt angst was too tedious for him.

  "I'm tired of being this plastic person," I continued. "I don't want to just smile and wave at the masses when I'd really like to retch. I'm tired of you, too, and every one of your ridiculous posse of friends."

  "Perhaps, you are just tired of yourself?"

  "That too," I agreed. "I'm just sick of my own skin. I need to go away somewhere and be just me for a little while."

  He blew a cloud of grey smoke into the air and rubbed his temples.

  "I've got to get to work," he said dismissively, finishing his cig and dropping his tablet on the table.

  "Will you think about it?" I asked as he rose and reached for his cane, which hung from the back of a chair. "Going on vacation together or letting me go alone?"

  He grunted and limped across the room to the staircase. "Running away isn't going to solve your problems. Go outside and get some fresh air today. You have been spending far too much time indoors."

  "That's because it hasn't stopped raining," I called after him. "This rain is extremely depressing. Everything is depressing."

  "You are depressing," he replied as the echoes of his footsteps thumped down the stairs to his office one floor below.

  "Yeah? If you were really all powerful, you'd make it stop raining and you'd cure my friend. You're a fraud. You always were."

  He didn't hear that last part as he was already well down the stairs. Maybe, he hadn't heard any of it. In either case, he wasn't going to do anything about it.

  Again, I almost got up to clear our two breakfast dishes, but couldn't manage to rouse myself from the table. I stared at the dreary grey snail trails of water that ran down the wall of windows on the east side of our suite, casting the ocean and the sky in opaque grey shadows. Even the sand was just a variation of the same grey. Here in the best suite, in the most beautiful palace in the entire galaxy, I was surrounded by nothing but ugliness.

  The hallway door opened, and Luci's high heels tapped across the floor as she entered the room.

  "Is the coffee hot still?" She headed straight toward the kitchen, her bright orange hair like a fiery comet in the midst of all this grey. "Have you got any more cheese Danish left from yesterday?"

  "I think so. Check the fridge. Make more coffee if you want."

  "Oh, it's fine." Luci returned a moment later with a mug cradled in her hand and a dish with a Danish. "I don't mind my coffee a little cold. If one adds enough sugar and cream, anything will taste good. Actually, maybe I should just skip the coffee and drink the sugar and cream? What do you think?" She set her dishes on the table and then cleared off our empty breakfast dishes as if she were the maid. I began to protest, but she just waved her hand and cleaned up anyway.

  "Did you hear anything?"

  "Berkie spoke to Taner about an hour ago. He said, she's doing well. She's really quite good at this now. Already, she is snapping at the nurses and ordering the doctors about. They think they got it all." Luci studied her lukewarm coffee but didn't drink it. "Maybe, they are correct this time."

  "Hopefully." Doubt gnawed in the pit of my stomach. This was Caroline's second battle with cancer. She'd already had a double mastectomy, a bunch of lymph nodes removed, and now they had found some in her lungs. I just didn't understand how we could have ships that traveled at light plus ten, cellphones that allowed us to talk and see each other light years away, devices that could repair damage to the tiniest nerve endings but nothing that could stop a cancer from spreading. I just didn't understand why my husband, who had the power to heal in his hands, wouldn't heal my best friend.

  "I can't mend everyone," he had said turning his back to me.

  "You mean you won't," I had accused him. "I'm not asking for everyone. I'm asking for my friend Caroline, your friend Taner's wife."

  He just shook his head and muttered something about time having to happen in the way it was supposed to happen, his usual lame excuse. That was pretty much a confirmation that Caroline wasn't going to make it, and he wasn't going to do anything to help her. My eyes started leaking all over the tablecloth again.

  "We could ring her later today," Luci suggested, trying to be cheerful, though I could see her own eyes welling with tears. "Did
you ask for permission to go visit her in New Mishnah yet?"

  I shook my head. "I don't want to go visit. Everything going on in the hospital will be disrupted. If it was just you and me and we could sneak in the door, that would be one thing, but we can't go without a contingent of guards and press and everything else. We'll have to visit half the hospital too. I just don't feel up to cheering everyone else when I can't even cheer up myself. Forget it. Let's just call her."

  "Alright, we'll just ring her in a few hours when she wakes up." Luci sipped at her coffee. She made a face at it because she had probably forgotten it was cold. We both stared at the rain pelting the windows as if we were waiting for something to happen.

  "We could sneak in there, I suppose." I glared at the gold cuff bracelets which I wore on my wrists. They were keyed to the Palace doors, supposedly for my own safety. Which doors I could open, depended on His Imperial Majesty's whims on any given day. Lately, he had been irritated with me and so the only doors that I could pass through were my office and the terrace to the beach.

  Unfortunately, I had no desire to go out on the beach in the cold and wet. Working in my office where Caroline was always a fixture, only seemed to make me more depressed.

  "He told me, I should get some air today knowing full well that it's pouring down rain. Lately, I'm not finding his humor very funny."

  Luci looked at me askance. "He told you to go out in the rain?"

  "Yes, but he was probably joking. He wouldn't release me last month during those five minutes of sunny weather. Now when it's flooding for weeks on end, he tells me to go outside and get some fresh air. Is this what happens, Luci? After thirty plus years of marriage, do you just spend your time devising ways to make each other more and more miserable?"

  "I don't know. Your husband seems to garner enormous pleasure in making everyone miserable. I don't think he's exclusively picking on you." She poked at the cheese on her Danish, scooping it up and then sucking on her finger pensively.

  "Do you still love Berkan like you did when you were young?"

  "Well, no, of course not. I've got more sense now. Love matures just as we all do. Of course, we're grandparents now too. We can't exactly go around tearing off each other's clothes. That would be inappropriate. Fun, but unseemly. Maybe when Shika settles down you'll feel better about it all."

  "This isn't about Shika. This is about us. It's about me. I look in the mirror and wonder where my life went. What happened to Captain Katie?"

  "Only you know the answer to that." Luci shrugged and destroyed the rest of the Danish. "You are the one who saw her last. Did you know that if you break these pastries into tiny bits and only eat the little bits, you will consume less calories?"

  "Sure." I roused myself from the table and went to gaze out the glass French door. It was high tide and the swollen ocean was sending breakers practically to the sea wall. "Go out on the beach, he said. There isn't any beach left!"

  "Maybe he meant for you to go swimming? I wonder how many calories two pastries worth of tiny bits have?"

  "Go for it, Luci. You only live once. Senya, on the other hand…" I came back into the room and picked up my daily schedule. My roster was full of appointments with various dignitaries of the Empire. After all this time, it still amazed me how so many people wanted to meet with me. It boggled my mind how nervous they became when they did. "Maybe we could find time in the schedule to go visit Caroline. We could sneak in there. Maybe bring her something cheerful."

  "Pastries?"

  "Why not?"

  "Why not, indeed," Luci cried, jumping up. She ran to my closets and returned with one of my wool cloaks. It had a full hood and was deep royal blue color. "This shall be just the adventure you need. Put on your boots and some sunglasses."

  "It's raining!"

  "You don't want to be recognized, do you?"

  "You're crazy, Luci. I didn't mean we should go now!" I collapsed back down at the kitchen table and waved the schedule at her. "We've got all these people to meet today. Look, here is the Governor of Talas II. He wants to talk about a new scholarship fund for their universities."

  "That can wait!" Luci cried and summoned a maid to fetch her own cloak. "Caroline is a higher priority than a bunch of students who won't graduate for another four years."

  "Alright." I shrugged. "He did say, go outside."

  We left out the terrace doors and headed down three flights of marble staircases to the landing on the beach. It was even wetter outside than it had looked from inside. If it weren't for our heavy cloaks, we would have been soaked within minutes.

  "Do you remember how to get into New Mishnah from here?" Luci's breath billowed clouds of steam as she trudged up the beach beside me.

  "I think, we need to cut through the forest, and then we should find the highway. Maybe we can catch a city bus to take us over the river?"

  "Aren't there all sorts of terrible beasts in the forest?" A few tendrils of wet orange hair whipped in front of Luci's face.

  "Not any more. My husband ate them all. It was actually very convenient as I never had to make him dinner. Do you want to walk slower?"

  "No, I'm fine really," she replied, although she was huffing and puffing. "I'm just not used to all this exercise. It's good for me, right? Don't they say if you exercise, sixty is the new thirty-five?"

  "Who says that?" I scoffed. "Nobody, I know."

  After trudging along for at least another thirty minutes, Luci and I emerged from the forest at the boundary of the Palace grounds. There lay a cobblestone footpath leading into Old Mishnah. It was empty as even the bravest tourists had been scared away by weeks of endless rain. Surprisingly, no Palace Guards accosted us either. I glanced around behind us at both the footpaths and skies, searching for people or pods who might be trailing us inconspicuously. It appeared we were entirely alone. It felt liberating.

  "There's the bus," Luci cried, jumping up and down, waving her handbag. "Oh, this is delightful. I haven't taken a city bus since Berkie, and I lived in our flat in New Mishnah. That was before SdK came to Rehnor, before Marik was even born. I remember climbing up the steps when I was so heavy and pregnant."

  The driver waited patiently as Luci fumbled in her handbag searching for a paycard for our fare. It had been years since I carried a handbag or a paycard and I hadn't given a thought to bringing either one. As the bus lifted off again, we stumbled to the back, Luci continuing to regale me with her public transit adventures from thirty years before.

  The bus flew down the side of the hill, toward Old Mishnah and then rising again, it crossed the River Nika. We soared up and across the ever increasing landscape of New Mishnah, as a faint hint of the Rehnorian sun shone briefly through the clouds.

  "Oh, there's the original SdK campus with the clock tower," Luci cried and pointed out the rain splattered window. "I remember when that was a rusted old theme park, populated by homeless. Of course, I remember when it was a brand new shopping mall. I bought my wedding dress there. They had the nicest shops and restaurants. That was before the Great Depression. You weren't here during all that."

  "No, I wasn't." I gazed at the clock tower which still bore a giant image of Senya's face on the side and remembered the first time I had looked up at it, thinking I was delusional. His picture was current, showing him at this age now, with his shining silver and black hair and the soft crinkles near his eyes. His pupil-less eyes always seemed to look at both everything and nothing. Even now, it appeared as if he was watching us as we flew beneath him in this bus. He was smiling in the picture, a wry, supercilious twist to his mouth as if he knew exactly what we were doing and why.

  "This is our stop," Luci said as the bus hovered at a station next to the SdK hospital. "That was fun. We ought to do it more often."

  "Absolutely," I agreed, stepping down to the sky bridge and then following Luci through the hospital entrance en route to room 1302 West. "Every Empress ought to take public transit instead of limos. Of course, we haven't left the Palac
e in ten years, so we haven't taken any limos either."

  "Well, getting out is good for us," Luci declared as she passed under the lobby portrait of me. "I haven't seen you this chipper in weeks, and don't you worry," she continued loudly, pointing at the portrait, "no one will ever recognize you in your hooded cloak. We are perfectly safe here without any guards, just as we were on the bus."

  "I'm not sure of that," I said, as her voice alerted just about everyone in the lobby. "Come on."

  Grabbing her arm, I dragged her to the lifts. We rocketed up to the thirteenth floor and then raced down the hall to Caroline's room where Taner immediately welcomed us inside.

  Chapter 2

  Taner

  "I'm so glad y'all could come visit me," Caroline whispered, breathing laboriously as if the mere act of speaking were equivalent to running a marathon. I wished I could fill her lungs with the breath from mine.

  I wished I could take all the disease out of her body and put it in mine instead. She was too young and had already suffered too much in this life to be experiencing this pain. It broke my heart for her and for myself, for unless some miracle happened, I was soon to be alone again.

  "Of course, we came," Luci declared and held Caroline's hand. Katie nodded and smiled awkwardly, her eyes full of tears. "We've brought your work for you, too. We're getting very behind on the invitations to the Holiday Ball."

  "Well, I'm guessing you'll have to do it for me, Luci," Caroline replied. "I'll owe you a favor for next time."

  "I shall hold you to it." Luci raised her chin and then backed away so Katie could move next to the bed.

  "Now Miss Katie," Caroline scolded, her voice rasping. "I see those tears in your eyes, and I won't have it. You're not to weep over me, girlfriend. I need you to put that steel back in your spine and get your mind back on your business. You get yourself together, honey pie, and start acting like the Empress-lady that you are. The future of this Empire is too dependent on what you do."