Chelen City: Chapter Nineteen, Part One

 Note: We're back! And diving deep into plot, woohooooo!!! Happy New Year, my darlins!

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Nineteen, Part One

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Chapter Nineteen, Part One

 

Not one to stop and pause after the first step, Elanus figured that as long as he was spending a shit ton of money, he ought to do some more good with it. He used his connection with the capital’s hospital to open up negotiations for the companies doing the maintenance for every administrative hospital on the planet. When their specs were sent along as part of the evaluation packages for sales and mergers, he used the details provided to hack their schedules and their programming and ensured that every other city-run Regen tank disabled its ability to deliver Vitamin E3.

He even ended up buying a few of the better companies, because there was a lot to be said for diversifying your portfolio.

So, that was the most urgent issue taken care of. No Vitamin E3 meant no one new was getting infected with Elfshot Disease. Now, it was time to move on to dealing with Restaria.

Elanus spent a few days obsessively monitoring xir movements, tapping into every camera system he could find and leaving tracers to inform him of whenever Restaria passed that way again. Xir’s home was almost as impenetrable as Elanus’s to invasion, which meant it would take him a while but wouldn’t be impossible. However, it would be greatly aided by some on-location devices, which Kieron had offered to handle the same way he’d done with Caria. But Elanus wasn’t comfortable with that, for reasons he couldn’t name without making Kieron mad at him.

It wasn’t that he doubted Kieron’s abilities, he really didn’t. But Restaria, if xe was the mind behind this plan for now, was capable of some incredibly long-term planning. One had to wonder what xe had foreseen, and whether or not xe knew to expect Elanus’s incursion somehow. Certainly, whoever had attacked his home had managed to take advantage of weaknesses that Elanus hadn’t even thought to address because no one was supposed to know about them.

If Restaria was the person who’d issued the virus that had attacked Catie, if xe was the person behind the attacks on Ryu, if xe was responsible for maintaining the Elfshot program, then Elanus was already behind the curve. Xe shouldn’t have been able to target Catie because no one should have been able to do that, certainly not so successfully. It meant Catie’s abilities had been shared somehow, probably through Deysan, and who had Deysan constantly been trying to court? Moreno, the president. Who held the keys to getting through to Moreno? Restaria.

The odds were about fifty-fifty that xe was behind it all, and honestly Elanus would have preferred a cabal at this point. He didn’t like being out-thought, but he’d allowed his belief in his own abilities to get the better of his common sense.

When you start believing your own myths, it’s time to come down from the clouds.

He’d monitor xer a while longer, paint a picture of xir movements and get a sense of xir schedule and go from there. Until then, he’d look into curing his own Elfshot disease. That meant taking a lot of blood, doing a lot of tests, and spending way too much time in the Regen room with Ryu as he not-so-patiently looked for the clues in his body that would spell a way out of this mess without having to regrow his own damn skeleton.

It was easier to devote time to boring things on days like this. The company was running smoothly, Catie and Lizzie and Pol were, astonishingly, getting along while participating in a self-insert adventure show taking place in a jungle somewhere (Catie had chosen a dinosaur for her avatar, no surprise there, while Lizzie was some sort of effervescent floating sprite), and Xilinn was working through the laborious certification process for citizenship. Kieron had left for his therapy appointment half an hour ago, and Ryu was still unconscious, although he’d be ready to wake up in another few days, so…

[Target movements out of sequence.]

Elanus stiffened as the notification came through his implant. “Define movement.”

[Target has proceeded to Stellar Cabinet two-point-four days ahead of schedule.]

“Shit.” The Stellar Cabinet was a government facility in orbit around Gania, where the president, vice-president, and other high-level officials did a lot of their negotiating in order to evade the appearance of favoritism, the use of listening devices, and, well…just to make themselves look good, honestly. The Stellar Cabinet was gorgeous, a retro-style circular base that had been built over fifty years ago. It was one of the only places in Ganian territory where Elanus hadn’t laid a hand on the technology.

Why was Restaria going there now?

“Purpose of change?”

[Unknown.]

“Extrapolate.”

[The flight manifest includes a weight allowance of eighty-three-point-nine kilograms.]

Eighty-three-point-nine kilograms…what the fuck was that the weight of? Not enough for heavy machinery, but too much for personal belongings…

A query blinked in the corner of Elanus’s implant. He didn’t recognize the sender at first, but the number eventually sorted to one Delilah Farraday.

Kieron’s therapist. How did she get my—ah, as his emergency contact, of course.

Fuck. Why is she reaching out to Kieron’s emergency contact? He instantly took the call. “What’s wrong?” he demanded immediately. “Is Kieron okay?”

“That’s why I’m calling,” she said, and Elanus almost rolled his eyes at the non-answer. “He didn’t show up to our appointment. His personal feelings about therapy aside, Kieron’s never been less than dedicated about making them. The one time he missed, he messaged me over a day in advance, and he didn’t do that this time, so…”

She said something else, but Elanus had already filtered her out. All he could hear was that Kieron wasn’t there. All he could think about was a flight manifest with a weight allowance of eighty-three-point-nine kilograms. One hundred and eighty-five pounds.

Kieron’s weight.

Restaria had left Gania. Xe hadn’t gone far, but xe had gone someplace where Elanus had no connections. He tried anyway, reaching for Kieron’s implant over and over, but all he got was the basic “hold” message. Kieron always shielded his implant during therapy appointments, it hadn’t bothered Elanus when the block went up, but now…

Now it meant that Kieron was beyond his reach. Restaria had him.

Xe had taken Kieron, and Elanus didn’t know what the fuck he was going to have to do to get him back.