The surreptitious harvest didn’t take long. Both Markel and Acorna had nimble hands and were agile on their hands and knees. They gathered up their booty and retreated to the tube, and Markel refastened the grill behind them. He beckoned for her to follow him some distance away from the ‘ponies unit before he signaled her to stop and start eating. Which was perfectly understandable, for carrot chomping could be heard if one was listening for it. Even, perhaps, if one was not, because she was chewing as fast as she could. She took chard next, then experimented with the dark red thing he handed her, and that was good, too. Well, almost anything would have tasted good to her at that point.
After those sorely needed restorative mouthfuls Acorna thought again of Calum. He, too, would be hungry and thirsty. If only she knew where he was being held!
She tapped Markel’s shoulder as he was chewing away at a raw potato and indicated she wanted to speak. He nodded but cautioned her -with a finger across his lips to speak quietly.
“My friend will have no food or water. If only you could figure out where he is being kept, could we get to him with something to eat and drink?”
Markel considered and finally gave a sharp nod. “He’ll be in the secure area,” he whispered, “where they keep the important prisoners.”
Acorna’s heart sank. “I tried to make them believe he knew nothing.”
“Didn’t work,” Market told her, “or they’d’ve tossed him in the holding cells like they did you. It’ll be a lot harder to sneak into the secure cells-but you’re right, we gotta try. Even if we can’t break him out-and I ain’t promising, those cells are a lot tougher-we can prob’ly slip him a water bottle and some greens. He’ll need it, too! Sometimes they ‘forget’ to feed the folks in detention. I hate it,” he whispered. “I keep thinking, what if somebody dies, and I could have saved him … but some of the ones they throw in the cells are Palomellese. If they found out I was free, they might sell me out to gain favor with Nueva.”
Acorna’s heart ached at the decisions that had been forced on the boy, decisions that would have been heartbreaking for a mature adult. “Well, I can assure you that neither Calum nor I will sell you out – no matter what happens!”
Balaklire, Unified Federation Date 33.05.17
Once she got over her shock at being surrounded By unicornpeople instead of facing just one, Karina realized that she might really be onto something here. The entire rest of the populated galaxy thought that Acorna was the only one of her kind. But here were four more of the unicornpeople-and she was the one who had been Chosen to act as their guide and interpreter! Once it had been established, with a great deal of pointing and head tossing and shrugging and mane twitching, that none of the four around her was Acorna, Karina was able to guess that they were looking for Acorna. It was strange, the way their meaning seemed to come into her mind if she just let them say their strange nasal words and didn’t try to understand. The trick seemed to be not to think about it, to convince the busy part of your head that you were actually thinking about something else and Just sort of accidentally overhearing their conversation.
In the first minutes on the unicornpeople’s spacecraft, Karina found that trick quite easy to pull off. Everything was so different, so … magical? Or just alien? She couldn’t decide. The soft, flowing draperies they wore, the glowing translucent horns on their foreheads, the couches where they reclined so gracefully, even the gentle radiance that lit the interior of the spacecraft all spoke to her of a Higher World guided by thought and love, the Upper Realm she had so long been seeking to contact. But when one of them went through a slitted opening into another part of the spacecraft, she saw a board covered with twinkling dials and long projecting levers that had not been made for any human fingers to manipulate. That made her nervous, so she decided not to think about it but to concentrate on boosting her psychic awareness so that she could communicate better on a pure and spiritual level.