The Return to Irithara (Children of the Sun Book 2)

“Hey, have you thought about what we’ll do if we actually find a computer?” Alor asked as he followed Nef through what felt like the hundredth corridor. The Umbra who’d shown them around had told them about a door that was supposed to have an X on it that they should never try to enter. So naturally, that was the first place he and Alor wanted to check out. The problem was that they couldn’t find it.

“Uh, yeah, we’ll dig up some dirt,” Nef replied with annoyance, rolling his eyes. He’d already said that, hadn’t he? This endless maze of corridors and doors with no markings on them was really starting to anger him, and his brother wasn’t helping.

“No, I get that. But the Umbra don’t use Global.”

Nef stopped dead in his tracks. How the hell had he forgotten about that little fact? He’d been so eager to figure out what this organization was hiding that he’d completely overlooked the fact that he couldn’t read anything that they would have in their databases. Well, maybe he could read it with the app he’d been working on, but he wouldn’t be able to understand it.

Then he realized something else, as well. “Well, maybe they do now. I mean, Mom’s working for them, and she sure as hell can’t speak that weird-ass language Eternals use.”

“You don’t know that,” Alor argued. “But we should definitely check it out.”

It was nice having a supportive older brother. Not that Nef would ever tell Alor this.

It felt like an eternity had passed by as they aimlessly strolled from one corner of the main building to the other, feeling more and more creeped out by the fact that the building was devoid of life, but then, finally, they found the door.

The X on it really made the door stand out because, for the most part, the other doors were all exactly the same. Now they just needed to figure out how they were going to open it.

“Any ideas besides brute force?” Alor asked, and Nef scanned the door with his eyes. Unlike most of the other doors, this one didn’t have a knob, or a lock, or anything like that. Instead, next to it was a small yellow circle with a red light in the middle. Probably a chip scanner.

“Yeah, actually. Do you have something we could use to get rid of the yellow part of this thing?” Nef pointed at the scanner, and Alor nodded, pulling a knife out of his back pocket. Nef hadn’t even known he had one on him.

“Are you sure it won’t trigger some alarm?” Alor asked, already pushing the knife into the tiny space between the scanner and the wall.

“No.”

Alor sighed but started prying the cover away, anyway. It clearly took some effort on Alor’s part as Nef watched him push on the knife with everything he had with gritted teeth, but after a minute or two, the yellow cover finally broke away and fell to the ground.

When Nef saw the assortment of wires inside the scanner, he thought he’d get a decent challenge, but he soon figured out all he had to do was connect the wire that sends the signal from the chip into the door opening mechanism.

Feeling slightly disappointed when the door slid open, Nef walked into the tiny dark room. He didn’t even need a flashlight to see that there was a single computer in the room. However, unlike the ones in the hideouts, this one actually wasn’t only a screen. It still was a huge screen mounted on the wall, but under it was a black box that had to be the actual computer, and between the two there was also a physical keyboard attached to the wall.

Maybe he could actually control this without having Mel around. Or Rayni, Nef supposed, but her ability to use the Eternal language wasn’t really reliable. From what he’d noticed, she usually could only use it when she came in contact with the language, but she didn’t seem to know to initiate speaking in it.

He took a few steps forward, which was enough to reach the keyboard, and after studying the familiar yet unreadable letters for a bit, he decided to press a random key, hoping that that would turn on the computer.

Both he and Alor groaned in annoyance as the sudden light from the screen blinded them momentarily. Nef blinked rapidly, squinting as he tried to make sense of the computer. It frankly looked like any regular operating system, with folders all over the screen and the Umbra logo as the background.

Unfortunately, all of the folders had titles written in the Eternal language.

“Well, nevermind then,” Alor commented with a sigh. “C’mon, let’s go before someone catches us.”

Nef ignored him and pulled out his phone, opening the translator app, while Alor frowned at him.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve been working with Mel on an app to translate this stuff in case we needed translation and didn’t have an Eternal with us. So far it can only translate the letters into ours, but since some of the words sound similar to our language, maybe we can use that.”

Alor’s eyes widened. “Why haven’t you mentioned that before?”

“Well, it barely works. And we didn’t need it until now.”

Nef quickly scanned the entire screen with his phone’s camera and let the app analyze the writing, tapping his foot impatiently. Alor peered over his shoulder as the translation finished, leaving behind a bunch of random words.

There were always two or three per folder, which was a bit strange, but none of them were familiar to him at all. Well, that was even more disappointing than the difficulty of breaking into this room.

Or so Nef had thought until he scrolled down.

“Hey, that’s Rayni’s name,” said Alor, pointing at one of the folders titled Raynimara Iner. Nef blinked, wondering how he hadn’t noticed it before his brother.

“Okay, so these have to contain files about the Umbra,” said Nef, intending to continue when he noticed another name next to Rayni’s file. “Melwynar Iner?”

“What?” Alor asked, staring at the phone in shock. Surely Melwynar wasn’t Mel’s full name. Was it?

“Okay...” Alor said, running a hand through his hair. He seemed to be at a loss for words, and Nef was as well. “That…that’s not Mel, right?”

Nef quickly looked at the rest of the folders’ titles, but no other name came even close to sounding like Mel.

“I think it is,” Nef replied and swallowed. What did this even mean? Were Mel and Rayni brother and sister? Husband and wife? Son and mother? Who could tell when Eternals lived forever, and Rayni didn’t even remember how old she was.

“Open one of the folders,” Alor said urgently, and Nef nodded, clicking on Rayni’s. He frowned at what he was presented with, trying to make sense of the strange letters. The icons were at least a bit similar to what normal operational systems used, so he could deduct that most of the files were text files. He skipped over those since opening them would be a total waste of time and instead focused on the image files that were there.

He opened the first one and blinked. It kind of looked like a mug shot of Rayni, except unlike her usual joking self, she looked terrified as she held a paper with, presumably, information about her.

Her hair was a mess and the purple strand was missing, she was wearing old, tattered clothes, and on her face were tattoos in the form of red, and black lines—two horizontal ones on each of her cheeks, three vertical ones on her forehead, and one under each eye.

“Those look almost just like Mel’s,” Alor commented, looking at the picture with discomfort. Nef wasn’t surprised—he didn’t like seeing Rayni like this either, and he’d only known her for a little over a month.

“Y’know, when he changes into a dragon,” Alor continued, and Nef agreed. It was very similar, which only supported the theory that they were related.

“Do you think there’s a date on that paper?” his older brother asked, pointing at it, and Nef did his best to scan it as quickly as possible.

“It says 2533, but that could mean anything. They don’t have to use our calendar,” Nef replied, feeling more and more frustrated. If this were according to their calendar, that would make Rayni over four hundred years, which Nef wasn’t able to imagine at all.

“What’s on the other pictures?”

Nef went through them, but they were just photos of Rayni from different angles, and seeing that there were only more text files after the images, Nef went to the file on who they assumed was Mel.

And indeed, this was confirmed as soon as he opened the first image file.

Mel looked even more scared than Rayni. In fact, he seemed to be doing his best not to start crying if his glassy, reddened eyes were anything to go by. And the tattoos on his face were the exact same ones as the ones he had in his dragon form. Unlike Rayni’s they were white and orange, and there weren’t any under his eyes. Instead, there were three horizontal lines on his nose.

“This…this makes no sense. Mel said he was possessing someone who was dead,” Alor said, gesturing frantically to the screen. “Is this his host?”

“I dunno, but he looks pretty alive to me,” Nef replied, not understanding the situation at all either. “We have to be missing something obvious.”

Nef felt like something super obvious was going on here, but he couldn’t quite figure it out. It wasn’t often he got this feeling, and he hated it with a passion.

But before he could think about it more, their mother’s voice yelled at them from behind them.

“What the hell do you two think you’re doing?”