It was a modest diversion. Tanit found the late-night market as she walked towards the temple. None of the foods looked good to her. One thing looked like a potato but was soft and fleshy on the inside, more like a turnip. She turned away from the crowd, placed the nasty vegetable on the ground, and walked away from it.
Moving through the crowd was something that was not going well with Tanit. She tried hard to avoid bumping into people, but the crowd was thick. People would turn to apologize and find no one there. One woman screamed, a man swung his arm at empty air.
Finally she found something that looked and tasted like an orange. She ate six of them along with her pudding before she reached the temple. She checked the PTD settings. The cruiser coordinates were dialed in and a simple command away.
The temple was full of people. There was a man standing in front of the crowd at an altar.
“We come from the stars, brothers and sisters. We’ve been out there,” he said, pointing towards the sky. “And it’s time that we return. Allor wants us to join them again. He brings healing. But most importantly, he brings knowledge.”
There were several thousand people in the main temple. Tanit moved carefully around the edges of the crowd. But again, she bumped into people who couldn’t see her. But finally, after the last invisible apology, she reached the chambers and hallways behind the temple. She found a quiet corner and sat down. She was scared. She watched the pairs of guards standing outside of some of the rooms off the hallway in front of her.
“They can’t see me. They don’t even know I’m here,” she whispered to herself. She felt more confident for a moment. It was a moment that ended when three men walked down the hall with baskets filled to the top with human heads in glass jars filled with a clear red fluid. The heads looked terrible, the faces all contorted by the anger and hatred of battle. All except one, the smiling one.
Despite the cloaking, Tanit settled into one of the dark corners behind the columns. She chose the one with the best view of the hallway. Now it would be her waiting game. Koven had taught her a lot about waiting. It was the guards at the far end that gave her the first opportunity. They both were called into the room. When they entered, they left the door open.
Tanit didn’t waste any time. She had already taken off her shoes to be as quiet as possible. Then she sprinted as fast as she could down the hallway towards the room then through the open door.
The room was purple, everything was purple: the curtains, the cushions, and the bed covering. Inside of the room were another two guards and a man dressed in purple. Tanit quickly moved to one side of the room away from them as she noticed her breathing was heavy from running. She promised herself that she would get back on her exercise regime as soon as they were home and safe.
Dancing lessons. Despite all of the years, the distance and everything else, dancing lessons for little girls are still the standard for parenting. It was the subject of Tanit’s most painful childhood memory, the humiliation of being the one tiny girl with debilitating stage fright. She stood under the lights, her body frozen in fear, all except her bladder, which chose that moment to cease cooperation with the rest of her body. And her childhood terror was based on a simple thing. She had stumbled walking up the stairs to the wooden sun on the stage filled with children. So it is little wonder that when Tanit came back to the three steps close to the door, she tripped over the first one and fell.
Even an invisible body makes a sound when it hits a sandstone floor.
“Did you hear that?” asked the man dressed in purple, and turned his head quickly towards the door.
Tanit lay motionless on the floor, carefully controlling her breathing.
“Hear what?”
“I heard something, be quiet,” said the human grape.
Tanit began to hold her breath as the man looked directly at her and saw nothing. She was thinking it was going to be OK. When they looked away, she would get up and quietly take the final four steps to the door and the safety of an exit.
As she was watching and waiting for them to turn away, she heard a voice behind her, coming in the door.
“Pens, I want to discuss a few things. We need to stop referring to me as…” the man with the long black hair and black eyes didn’t finish his sentence because he tripped over Tanit. He fell down all three stairs and hit hard on the sandstone floor. The man in purple and the four guards watched as their king and former god hit face first on the floor.
Tanit didn’t waste a moment. She was up on her feet and out the door as fast as she could.
“Get the remedium,” she heard the man in purple yell as she left the room.
Outside in the cavernous hallway, it was quiet except for whispered conversations between the guards.
“There is an intruder,” she heard the man in purple yell from the room she had just left.
At these words, all of the guards began to look around.
“They are cloaked. Invisible. Use your ears,” his voice boomed out.
But by that time Tanit was back in the main temple, moving around the back of the crowd towards the front entrance. She knocked down a man in her haste to get away. The old man with the walking stick was no match for Tanit and her shoulder.
She took the last orange from her pocket when she was sitting safely back aboard the cruiser, in the sleeping quarters, sitting on the bed with her back to the wall. Now I will tell you that there were tears in her eyes. But they weren’t tears of fright. Nor were they tears of concern for Koven. No. These were tears of anger. Anger at herself. Anger for thinking she could capture and succeed with a historian. Anger at her delusional mind that thought that she, she who is not that special, she who can relate best to calculations and formulas, she who has been overweight since her first boyfriend dumped her all those years ago, anger at her mind that thought that she could force a different outcome from the crowd. She threw the orange at the bulkhead.
Rescue was a lot harder than she thought it would be.
But there was still time to get the cruiser back.