Adrian was by Reya’s side in the med bay when the ship entered hyperspace. He hardly ever left, doing what little he could to comfort her. He was relieved that the journey would only take two days because he wasn’t sure Reya would last much longer.

  He died a little inside seeing the naked fear in her eyes when she was put into a medically induced coma before they dropped out of hyperspace near the barren planet they were destined to return to. His trepidation grew the closer they got. He’d never wanted to return to the place where he’d been experimented on so horrifically. A shudder ran down his spine when the announcement came that they’d arrived.

  Kell entered the room, his expression grim and serious as he carted Reya out of the med bay. “Don’t worry,” he said, looking over his shoulder back towards Adrian when he was almost out the door, “I’ll make sure she comes back home to you.”

  While the sentiment was appreciated, it did little to calm Adrian’s nerves as he was left behind in the med bay, terrified he would lose the person most important to him.

  The doors shut behind Kell, who was joined by Rann in the hall. Rann studied Reya’s sleeping form carefully. “You’re sure this is the best way?” Rann asked. Like the others, she’d been informed of the devolving situation regarding Reya’s health. While Kell hadn’t gone too far into detail, the team understood the seriousness of Reya’s condition and how vital the operation was to her survival.

  The pair started towards the ship’s ramp that would bring them directly into the facility. “I’m not,” Kell said, resignation filling his voice. “But at this point, we have no other choice but to trust in Ava to save our friend. After everything she’s been through, she deserves a chance at happiness.”

  Rann’s expression softened as she glanced back towards Reya. “She does,” Rann agreed. “And I know you’ve studied the surgery extensively so that you can be of help to Ava during the procedure.”

  “The use of gru’ul tools worries me,” Kell fretted. “I’ve got some of my own tools to help,” he said, gesturing under the bed where several cases were placed on a bottom tray, “but I don’t know if they’ll even be useful.”

  The pair continued their walk and met up with the rest of the team, save for Eimir, who was to stay behind with Adrian and Tassie on the ship. Jyn and Beor were fully suited in combat armour, ready to go. Rann put on her helmet and checked her weapons. Once they were clear, they all descended the ramp where Irric and Ava were waiting patiently.

  “Follow us,” Irric said. “The room has already been prepped for the surgery. Everything is ready to go.” He proceeded to guide the group through the facility, back to where it all began, so long ago. They breezed through the various checkpoints, Irric simply walking past without slowing down. The guards let them pass without bothering them, each of them aware of Irric’s high rank in their mission at the facility. His orders were second only to Nadi and Commander Cyrix when it came to anything related to facility. Now that the soldiers knew the real reason why they were stationed on such a desolate planet, they had a newfound appreciation for Irric and his work.

  The group continued their pace until they reached the room where Adrian’s surgery happened. Rann, Jyn, and Beor looked around with interest. Kell was already familiar with some of the room’s layout, but even he paused to take in the various tools and equipment.

  Along a table were the organs to be transplanted into Reya, encased in the same blue substance that had kept Adrian preserved during his stasis. Two small tubs were positioned next to the encased organs. Ava helped Kell put Reya onto the operating table. She looked at the rest of the group. “You can all leave now,” she ordered. “The less distractions we have, the better her odds of surviving.”

  “We won’t abandon Reya without anybody guarding her,” Jyn insisted.

  “You’ll be nothing more than a hindrance,” Ava said. “There’s only one way into this room. Guard the exterior and everything here will be fine. I have no weapons on me. Your doctor can remain armed for all I care.” She studied Reya closely. “We don’t have much time left. Leave.”

  “It’ll be fine, Jyn,” Kell said with false bravado. “We’ll make sure that she makes it out alive.”

  Reluctantly, Jyn and the others left the room, leaving only Ava and Kell behind. They immediately got to work prepping Reya for her surgery. She was stripped of her clothes and an IV was inserted into her. Kell didn’t know what was in the IV bag, but Ava reassured him it was necessary. Carefully, they inserted a tube down Reya’s throat. Once in place, Ava started the ventilator and Reya’s chest rose and fell at an artificially stabilized rate.

  “It’s time to begin,” Ava said, picking up a metal tray covered in a waxy substance. She went over to the table and gingerly picked up the alien heart encased in the blue amber. Tampering with the encasing, the blue substance turned to liquid and was promptly drained into the first tub. Using a pair of tongs, she carefully withdrew the heart and dipped it into the second tub. When she lifted it back up, it was clear of any remaining blue liquid and was completely clean. After placing it on the tray, she returned to the operating table and set the heart down onto a smaller table next to it.

  Together, Ava and Kell started the surgery, slicing Reya open and mimicked, to the best of their abilities, the surgery performed on Adrian so long ago. Ava expertly handled the tools and seamlessly connected the strange organ to Reya’s body after removing her old heart.

  Hours passed as the pair worked tirelessly to ensure each organ was where it should be. When they finished with the final organ, Reya’s sternum was reinserted and the bones sealed back together through a means Kell didn’t understand. They disconnected Reya from the various machines that had helped keep her alive and removed the tube from her throat. They closed her up and Kell made towards the gurney he’d brought Reya in on, retrieving an IV bag filled with a clear liquid.

  Kell swapped the IV bag hooked to Reya with one he’d prepared in advance, full of medication he was familiar with. Neither he nor Ava had any idea how Reya’s new physiology would react to the drugs but assumed it couldn’t hurt to have her doped up on painkillers. Nothing in their research indicated they would be harmful to Reya, so the two doctors decided to take a chance.

  They gingerly put her hospital gown back on and exited the room. After joining the rest of the team waiting outside, they proceeded to wheel Reya back to the ship. They passed through winding, twisting halls with alien symbols and engravings unphased.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Adrian was exactly where they’d left him, waiting anxiously in the med bay. He fidgeted in his chair incessantly, terrified he’d hear that Reya hadn’t survived the surgery — that Kell and Ava had failed. He was on the edge of his seat, having heard the team trudge solemnly through the hall leading to the med bay. The brief moment of the doors opening were an eternity to him, his alien heart beating even more erratically than normal.

  Then he saw Reya.

  Relief flooded him when he saw her chest rise and fall at a steady pace. “Was it successful?” Adrian asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” Kell replied in a heavy tone. “Time will tell. We were able to reproduce the surgery the gru’ul performed on you. Now it’s a matter of whether her body rejects the new organs.” He glanced at Reya, who slept peacefully on the gurney. He wheeled her towards a bed and with Adrian’s help, transferred her to it. “I’m going to go brief High Command now, they’re expecting me,” he said, exhaustion creeping into his voice. Though he’d worked tirelessly, there would be no rest for him any time soon.

  “Can I stay?” Adrian asked.

  Kell smiled. “Of course,” he said. He turned towards the others who had crowded the room and said, “Ava, Irric, and I will go to the conference room to deliver our report. Jyn, if you could please alert the General that we’re done. Tassie already has the room ready for us.”

  Jyn nodded. “Of course,” he said. He left the room and made his way towards the bridge to carry out what had been asked of him, opting not to waste any time. The others followed in quick succession and soon it was just Adrian and Reya left in the room.

  Adrian pulled his chair up next to her and gently stroked her head. Tears formed in his eyes at the reality Reya had found herself in. Anything could have gone wrong and there was nothing he could do. He gently said into her ear, “I love you, so much. Please come back to me,” and did something he hadn’t allowed himself to do in a very long time.

  He dared to hope.

  “Will she survive?” Kaius asked the trio before the Tribunal.

  Ava, Irric, and Kell were in the conference room, debriefing the Tribunal on the surgery’s results. “We don’t know,” Ava said. “We completed the transplant and followed the exact procedure the gru’ul performed on Adrian. Right now, Reya is still unconscious. We don’t know whether her body will reject the new organs.”

  “We weren’t asking you,” Cirrus said harshly. “We want proper opinions.” As far as she was concerned, anything that came out of Ava’s mouth couldn’t be trusted. That the others would so readily believe a weapon their enemy made left her furious.

  “It’s exactly as Ava said,” Kell interjected before Ava’s evident anger exploded. “Reya needs to be monitored until we know for certain that she’s accepted the strange organs. There’s little we can do except open her back up and try to fix it if something goes wrong.”

  “I trust that you will be sufficient to carry out the task, doctor?” Cirrus said. “Surely, you only need one person to watch over Reya if all you need to do is monitor her.”

  Kell hesitated. “Given the sheer complexity of the surgery we performed, if we need to operate on her again I’m afraid I’m going to need help. I might be able to do it alone, but I might miss something.”

  “I could stay,” Ava proposed. “We haven’t made much progress with our research recently and my time would be better used ensuring Reya survives.”

  “Absolutely not!” Cirrus huffed. “You are to stay in the Arvis sector. We won’t permit you stepping foot on Verilia. Who knows what kind of havoc you could cause.”

  “I promise not to do anything bad,” Ava said.

  “As if we could ever trust your words,” Cirrus sneered. “We’re at war with your creators. Inviting you into our home is just asking for disaster.”

  “I find myself in agreement with Cirrus,” Darros interjected. “We may have granted you rights, but at no time did we grant you a visa.”

  “How am I supposed to have rights if I’m trapped here on a barren planet?” Ava retorted. “Let me come. I don’t mind if you put me somewhere isolated. I’ve been working for you ever since I’ve gained sentience. I want to experience the world through my own eyes and not the programming that enslaved me.”

  “It’s too risky,” Cirrus pushed.

  Ava turned directly towards Kaius. “I would greatly appreciate this opportunity. I may even owe you a favour in the future for allowing me to live peacefully on Verilia.” She hoped her hint was enough for Kaius to intercede and grant her safe passage away from the facility. The Arbiter gave an ever so subtle nod, indicating that he’d understood.

  “I believe that Ava would be best used monitoring Reya,” Kaius announced.

  “What!?” Cirrus shouted, turning her attention towards Kaius. “You can’t be serious! We still don’t know what that thing is capable of. How could you even think for a second that letting it into our home would be a good idea? What if it cripples our infrastructure?”

  “I understand your concerns,” Kaius placated. “However, right now we need Reya as a symbol to unite the world. If she dies, we can’t make use of her to sway the masses. If they discover that Reya died while we did nothing, our conscription rates would plummet.”

  “Who cares?” Cirrus cried. “We’ll be lucky if we have enough time to properly train them. The conscription is a farce, and you know it. And we didn’t do nothing. We actively tried to save her.”

  “We performed a highly risky operation to turn her into something not fully a’vaare,” Kaius said bluntly. “That doesn’t sound all that great when we say it aloud. The public doesn’t have the luxury of having been aware of events from the start. Just the pieces we gave them.”

  “Does the opinion of the public truly matter at this point?” Cirrus asked. “We’ve declared martial law. We,” she stressed, “are the law now, in totality. They can’t do anything if we decide to use force.”

  “Our purpose is to defend our faction, not actively harm them!” Kaius said, outraged. “We don’t need to trust Ava fully. I propose we send her to the safe house with the others and isolate her there. That way, she’ll only do minimal damage should something go wrong.”

  Cirrus almost dismissed the proposal outright, until Orryn spoke up and said, “It might be to our advantage to have Ava there. We could display her as a sentient machine, one of the wonders we discovered. It would be something tangible people could understand.”

  “She’s not a wonder!” Cirrus retorted. “She unnatural and shouldn’t exist. If you thought the populace would be divided if Reya dies, adding Ava to the mix would send people into a frenzy.”

  Orryn nodded. “I understand that,” she replied smoothly. “But, what if we had her help improve our existing technology? She’s now one of the most well-versed people in gru’ul technology. We still have some samples we could give her to sturdy and revers engineer.”

  Cirrus paused, carefully considering the advantages of learning more about the more normal technology they were in possession of. “Would we have to give her the pieces?” she asked.

  “Only if truly necessary,” Orryn said. “Captain Jyn’s ship is furnished with a workshop that she could tinker in.”

  “If we allow her to leave the facility, our research there will cease,” Cirrus said, unhappy. “Can we really afford that?”

  “I think we’ve already learned most of the important things on the Highest’s terminal that aren’t corrupted. Besides, we have other researchers onsite that can handle the more mundane things we’ve collected. Important objects have been safely secured on the flagship for safe study. All that’s really left in the facility are the non-corrupted terminals, of which we’ve mined a hefty amount of data already. Our biologists are all in a tizzy over the discoveries they’ve made.”

  A reluctant look came over Cirrus’ face. “I don’t like this, but you’re right. At this point, we’d be better off studying what we’ve got. Fine, I’ll consent to the android coming to Verilia.”

  Darros looked around and knew that his desire to keep Ava at the facility would be overturned. Kaius called a vote still, and it passed with ease. He sighed. “I expect tangible progress towards scientific breakthroughs,” he said sternly.

  Ava suppressed a grin. “I’ll do my best. It’s still alien technology, after all.”

  “Any breakthrough will help,” Kaius said. He addressed the trio all at once. “You’re dismissed for now. Irric may stay temporarily but will be brought back to the facility if no progress is made on Verilia.”

  The soldiers were dismissed, leaving the Tribunal to go back to their previous discussion on how best to handle the war. The casualties would be heavy, but they had no choice but to account for heavy losses.

  Victory had to come at any cost.