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Cora nodded, bringing her eyes up to meet him again. That same look of compassion was there, and another layer of her reticence seemed to melt away.
“Yeah, I went in,” she confirmed. “It seemed pretty empty at first, and I kind of just let myself wander around. I found this huge room full of robots working on a production line, and I just got really excited, trying to figure out what they were making. Which is why I didn’t realize until it was too late that a couple of Jorvlens had come into the room. It became pretty clear that I wasn’t supposed to be there when they started yelling.”
She let out a big sigh at the memory. “I tried to run, but they were way faster than me. They grabbed me and threw me into a shuttle, which brought me here.” She shuddered a little as she remembered the words the Jorvlen had said to her as they threw her into the shuttle.
“I hope you said your goodbyes.”
She’d watched as Egshur receded behind the shuttle, screaming helplessly as the island became smaller and smaller, soon disappearing into the planet’s ocean as the shuttle breached the atmosphere and rocketed toward the mothership.
Her family was still down there, and she was only getting further and further away from them. The Jorvlens had even blocked her comm so she couldn’t make contact with them. She couldn’t, as the Jorvlen had so cruelly suggested, say her goodbyes.
“And you’ve been in here since?” Levi asked gently, breaking her out of her sad memories.
“Unfortunately,” she replied. “However, at least one decent thing has come out of this, I guess.”
Levi looked puzzled for a moment, and Cora liked the face he made when he was confused. It was endearing.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“At least there’s good company,” she answered, managing a smile.
Levi kept the same puzzled expression, looking over his shoulder to where the guard still patrolled the other corridor, and Cora knew the joke before he even said it.
“Who? These guys?” he asked, turning back to her and jerking a thumb over his shoulder. He winked and gave her a side-eyed look, letting her know he was playing.
Cora couldn’t help but laugh, or rather, stifle a laugh. She saw Levi grin back at her, and she could tell he’d enjoyed getting a chuckle out of her.
No doubt about it now. She definitely liked him. Only there was something she still needed to ask.
Chapter 4
Levi loved the sound of Cora’s laughter, even if it was more of a shy snicker than an actual guffaw right now. He hoped he’d get the chance to hear the unrestrained version at some point, though he couldn’t exactly imagine the circumstances.
Maybe I can rescue her, he thought. Images of his heroics were already playing out in his mind, like so many of the stories his brothers had come back with after their own adventures. The thought was appealing. He figured maybe if he could help her, they could see how much they liked each other beyond their casual jailbird flirtation.
He was definitely getting ahead of himself, though, which became even more apparent when Cora interrupted his fantasies with a serious question.
“So, what’s the Desolation Stone, exactly?” Cora asked.
The sobering question led his mind away from images of saving the day and getting the girl, and instead it plunged him into a somber recognition of the political, social, and environmental concerns that rested squarely on his shoulders.
“The Desolation Stone is an incredibly powerful artifact, dangerous if mishandled,” he told her. “It was located in a private collection on Kona for a while, though who knows where it came from before that.
“I work with an agency called PAPS. Probe and Pursue Services, on Noxxa,” he explained. “All my brothers do, actually. We run it together. We were called in to recover the stone after it was stolen from Kona. My older brother, Zyair, was working the case. He and his now-wife, Layla, discovered the Jorvlen had stolen it and were using it to build a weapon of mass destruction. We assume with the intention of destroying Lorr and doing to our planet what they did to their own—ravaging it of resources until there’s barely anything left.”
Levi could feel the righteous anger rising in him as he spoke, imagining his beautiful home planet transformed from the lush, diverse, forested place it was now to the desolate, burnt husk of a planet that was Jorvla. He couldn’t bear the thought.
“So that’s where it is now?” asked Cora, peering through his shield of anger and touching his heart with the softness of her voice. “Being turned into a weapon?”
He felt the rage ebb and took a deep breath as he continued.
“No. At least I hope not,” he said, shaking his head. “Zyair and Layla managed to get the stone back before the Jorvlen could use it, and they left it in the care of my father. We thought it was safe there, but just a week ago it was stolen right out from under our noses. It has to be the Jorvlens again.”
Cora nodded, apparently taking in the information, and Levi could see her thinking. He wondered what about. It almost looked like she was putting more pieces together than what he had given her, and he wondered if what she’d seen in the facility on Egshur might be part of the puzzle she was silently building in her mind.
“They’ve taken a lot of blows from us recently,” he added, suddenly eager to feed her more information. “My other brother, Trigg, and his wife, Willow, basically blew the lid off the Jorvlen being behind the Umbrosis Corporation. You’ve heard of them, I’m sure.”
Cora’s face suddenly turned ashen, and she nodded slowly. It gave Levi the impression she’d more than heard of the criminal enterprise masquerading as a pharmaceutical company, but she didn’t say anything.
