Pine Forest

Marin County, California

February 23

The blue boy's newly formed body had finally stopped screaming and now lay face down on the ground, eyelids squeezed tight against a world gone perversely awry. Imagined bile rose in a phantom throat. A venomous cold coursed through non-existent veins, gnawing at ethereal bones. Despite the cold he felt on fire, possessed by the millions of impulses that flooded his brain. Riding out on the solar winds, he tumbled through space and time, the stars tumbling through him, him tumbling back inside himself until eternity passed, the universe faded, and the fire inside him subsided.

Slowly, he opened his eyes.

He lay on his stomach, his face cradled in the hard mud as frosty blades of grass poked at his belly. The air was heavy with cold, and he shivered. Rolling onto his back, he looked up into the night. Fiery sparks of light littered the dark, winking at him through needle-leafed trees.

But the stars were in the wrong place, and he knew he was a long way from home.

Something hard and pointed thumped against his head. Annoyed, the boy turned to see a three-inch-high, octagonal piece of blue quartz—like two pyramids stuck together at their bases—balanced on its bottom point hovering bare inches from his nose, concern close to panic shimmering across its blue facade.

"I am—" The boy hesitated. His voice sounded hollow. Not at all like his usual, seventeen-year-old tenor. "I am all right," he assured the rock.

The rock shivered.

The boy pushed his shoulder-length hair from his eyes, surprised to see his hand was an impressive shade of robin's egg blue.

"I am blue," he said, studying it as if it belonged to someone else. He glanced down at the rest of him, and an aristocratic brow shot up on his forehead. "I am blue. And I am naked." He looked at the rock. "Let me guess. Something went wrong."

The rock twirled and then angled him a look. Wearily, the boy pushed up on his elbows, scanned his surroundings, and noted the diversification of trees and foliage, rocks, and sparse ground cover.

And an old friend, seated on a nearby log.

Dressed in knee boots, breeches, and a coarse island overcoat, a little more gray in his beard and hair than the boy remembered, the holographic image of General Kemnosh Siembibda, late of the Imperial Navy, offered the boy a smile, his gold eyes sparkling with amusement.

"General," the boy said.

"Majesty," the holo returned.

"Aren," he corrected.

"What?"

"You used to call me Aren."

"I apologize, Majesty," the image of his adoptive father said. "I'm only a holo and a hastily created one at that. I possess limited programming and can only relay information concerning the immediate task at hand."

Aren rose, wiping dirt and leaves from his bare backside, and crossed to sit beside the holo, the log cold and rough against his tender parts. "Where am I?"

The holo of Kemnosh Siembibda made an exaggerated point of looking around. "On Earth, I suspect."

"You are not sure?"

Kemnosh shrugged.

Once again Aren looked up at the night sky and the unfamiliar stars aligned in their roll-of-the-dice order. Odd how things could be so different and still be very much the same. "Where is my ship?"

The holo nodded at the crater filled to the rim with billions of tiny blue crystals. Fires of indigo and orange burned in patches across the crystals' undulating surface. A tower of blue light, as wide as the crater, shot high into the night sky, shining brighter than any homing beacon.

"This is all that is left of my ship?" Aren asked, incredulous.

"It would appear," the holo said.

Aren shook his head, frustrated, and then gestured at the crater's column of light. "A little obvious, do you not think?"

"A request for help. To alert your friends. Perhaps because your ship was destroyed before it could broadcast its distress signal. I can only conjecture, of course. My programming is limited to the mission's parameters, and only then to just the information I must impart to you."

"What information?"

"Majesty," Kemnosh's holo said, sitting up a little straighter, the weight of the moment obvious. "I have been programmed to inform you that you are dead."

Aren's right eyebrow shot up on his blue forehead. "What do you mean I am dead?"

"It is all very complicated, I think. I certainly do not have enough information to comprehend the finer details. But I can tell you that all attempts to rescue you from the Emperor, your brother, failed. Consequently, he had you tortured, and then executed. You, sitting here as you are, are a spirit. A disembodied soul."

Aren frowned. "You mean a ghost?"

"In the loosest, most colloquial sense of the word, I suppose you could say that. Technically, you are a soul, split from its body and manifest in physical form. Perhaps you are best explained as a spirit that exists as a real being in real time. You can feel cold and pain, but of course you cannot die because you are already dead."

Aren drew in a deep breath, raised his hand, and wiggled his fingers in front of the holo's blue eyes. "But I am alive. I am blue, but I exist."

"There is a genius evil in the universe, Majesty." A hint of sadness crept into its programming. "A brilliance that can take a being to the brink of death and yet not kill it in the traditional sense but split it apart. The soul from the body, the body no longer alive but not truly dead either."

Aren ran a hand across his blue chest. His skin and underlying muscles felt hard to the touch, like meat left too long in a meat locker. He thought about the sound of his voice, hollow inside his head, his inability to feel his lungs expand when he took a breath. The absence of a heartbeat. "But I do not remember any of that. Any of what you are telling me."

"Perhaps it is for the best, Majesty," the holo said gently. "I understand the procedure to split a soul from its body is most excruciating."

Aren held up a hand, needing a moment as he dropped his gaze to the ground, his face shadowed by his curling, blue hair. The holo seemed to understand and waited.

When Aren finally looked up again only his eyes reflected the horror he felt. "Is there a cure?" he asked, using "cure" for lack of a better word. He was a soldier. From his experience, death was something from which one did not recover.

"The cure is your child," the holo said.

Aren barked out a laugh. "How can a baby bring me back from the dead?"

"A kind of mysticism, I think." The holo shrugged. "I was not programmed to comprehend. Just to tell you that your child can do what is required with the rock's help."

The rock preened at Aren's feet.

"Where is my child?"

"Apologies, Majesty. We lost contact with your friends shortly after their ship took off and have not heard from them since. There is the possibility they never made planetfall."

Aren looked down at the rock. "My daughter has a tracer chip in her shoulder. See if you can locate the signal."

The rock scrunched, and then rolled off to do as it was asked. Or so Aren hoped. Rocks were unpredictable at best.

"One more thing, Majesty. As a spirit manifest in physical form, you have three days to find your child so she can return your spirit to your body. Three days. If not, your body will die and your spirit will be lost forever to the Void."

Aren tried to ignore the churn in the pit of his non-existent stomach, the sudden throb at his temples. He hadn't asked for this. The kingdom. The throne. Responsibility for a galaxy full of terrorized people and a war with the brother he had never met to free them. Growing up oblivious to his heritage, he had been content to live out his life in obscurity on his island world with the woman he loved.

Why does life insist on complicating even the simplest of dreams?

"Majesty," the holo said. "I imagine a million thoughts are running through your head, a million questions, and I wish I had the knowledge to answer them. However, I cannot stress enough the urgency of your situation. If you do not locate your child within the next three days, if your spirit is not returned to your body within that time, you will die."

Aren took a deep, non-existent breath, feeling like a sleepwalker in someone else's life. A life that would end in three days if he failed to find his child. "Anything else I should know?"

"Yes," the holo said. "You are advised to speak only American English and not your native tongue, least you make yourself conspicuous."

Aren almost laughed. As if being a six-foot-three, naked blue spirit manifest in physical form does not stand out enough. "Will this color fade?" He asked as he looked down at his blue body.

"Uncertain, Majesty. I'm only a hastily created holo, and my programming—"

"—is limited to the conversation at hand. Yes, so you have said. What about my ship? I cannot use that one." He nodded at the sea of blue crystals. "Why did it crash?"

"As far as I can ascertain, when your ship sent a signal to notify your friends that you had arrived, it bounced back with such ferocity that it overloaded the ship's electrical, flight, and stabilization systems which probably caused the crash, though I am uncertain how. I am just a holo, after all, and therefore incapable of conjecture."

"I do not suppose you have any clothes for me." Aren gestured at his nakedness.

Kemnosh Siembibda shrugged.

The rock cleared its throat, the sound inside Aren's head like broken glass rattling around inside a metal container. He looked over to see it seated on the shoulder of his physical body that lay face down in the mud. Crossing to join the rock, he rolled his naked body over on its back, shocked as he looked down into his own, lifeless face.

Premature age lines feathered the skin around his eyes. A blue, unblinking artificial eye stared up at him from its right eye socket, a wide scar running from the outside corner of the eye to disappear under his chin. Other scars crisscrossed his body, some broad and ugly, others no larger than the width of a hair.

Someone had taken great care in putting him back together.

I am only seventeen, but I look so old. So used up.

He touched the wide scar at the corner of his eye, but instead of skin felt the cold iciness of a force shield.

"Were you able to locate my child," he asked looking down at the rock.

It shuddered.

"Keep searching," he told it as he surveyed the area. "If my friends made it to this place, they will not have strayed far." He did not want to consider the alternative.

Crouching down, Aren hefted his body over his shoulder, surprised how little effort it took. Apparently, being a disembodied spirit came with some enhancements, superior strength being one of them.

He looked over at the holo of Kemnosh. "Will you be all right?"

The holo shrugged. "I'm just a program. All programs eventually end."

"Thank you."

The holo smiled. "Remember, Majesty, the inhabitants of this planet are notorious for having more curiosity than common sense. You will have company soon."

Aren nodded, and then sucked in a breath when he felt a sharp pain at his ankle. He looked down to see the rock preparing to make another assault.

"You have my attention," he told it, a warning in his voice not to do it again.

The rock twirled.

"Your insistence on finding my ship and leaving for home is premature. If we do not locate my child within the next three days, if she is unable to return my spirit to my body, we will die on this planet."