The Legacy of the Void

Chapter 6

Alya had gone back to work the next day expecting someone to be waiting. She was mildly surprised, and just a touch disappointed in the Underground for not having found her. She had given most of her previous evening to reading the file Michael had shared with her. Every time she did, her chest would ache with a terrible pang. Even then, at work, in the middle of a hot summer day, a tear ran down her cheek. She had been communicating off and on with the android for the better part of ten years. And each time, she knew he was rewritten, either by his own choosing or his master's. 

The Overlord had worked hard to utilize the android who embodied everything he hated. Melar Murud had sent Michael into countless situations to stamp out resistance and to, on the whole, destroy any efforts of fighting back. It went against his core programing, but Michael was still an android, and Melar had taken to reprogramming him, again and again, in a desperate search not only to fix the gift he had stolen, but also to find a way to duplicate what Arianya had once created.

 Once, when Alya was sixteen, she had found him, badly beaten and left chained to a radio tower where the currents electrocuted him on a regular basis. It would have been one of the soundest victories of the Underground, had they orchestrated it, but such brutality spoke of the Resistance. And given the number of burial stones left around Michael's mutilated form, he had taken out nearly the entire group.  

It had taken Alya the better part of three days to put Michael back together - in secret, hiding every single movement she made. In that time, she had seen just what the reprogramming had done to the android, and knowing as she did his ability to feel pain, she had cried over the readouts every day. She knew such pain, and it had eaten her soul to know another being could feel the same. After she had repaired him, he had made a point of caring for her. He had been the one to write in his own programing to recognize her with a code word. When she had argued that he was putting himself in danger, he had ignored her. Most of his emotional subroutines had been written over by Melar, but they had been shoddily done, and between the two of them, the android and the girl had been able to establish a base program to erase her from his memory banks every time they met. It burned like a knife wound each and every time they were able to communicate, because she knew how it would end. But she was no more able to stop helping him as he was to stop helping her. He had become her best friend, in an odd sort of way, and she had decided, all those years ago, that if she did nothing else in her life, she would save him.

Slowly, they had come to the point they were at now, both knowing, even briefly, that something had to be done about the Overlord. Now, given the information Michael had deemed the most important to start such a plan, Alya was left wondering what she was supposed to do with it. The most volatile private army would be the Resistance, but they would kill her on site. She considered the Underground, but after her near run in with them, she was wary to try. That left the Shadow Queen in the north with what remained of the noble Lalatians, but Rula was not fond of Alya, and the feeling was entirely mutual. However, Alya could see little other option, so she set the pieces in place to take time off of work, and as soon as she got home, she started looking for options - she needed first and foremost a way out of the Blender, then she needed a way back into the Shadow Queen's court.

As busy as she was with working through the program Michael had sent her and decrypting it so that it would be of some use to someone other than herself, she had not been so absorbed not to set a plethora of security measures all around the complex. The pale white sun of Nyx was setting when the first buzz alerted her that something was up. She was nearly done with her packing, and she had set out a course to get her as far was Tulwe, the border city between the Blender and the Temperate Zone, where the Lalitians tended to live. Frowning, she hit a switch and set up a few more alarms before going back to arranging her transport. The first alert merely meant she was being watched. She still had time. Precious little, but she knew she would make every second count.