Condition Evolution 4 by Kevin Sinclair (books for 10th graders TXT) 📕

essence of pain, anger, and despair. It was made all the more terrifying, coming from the usually happy and unflappable Fystr. His face looked like a twisted mask of horror and insanity. It occurred to me that his very last memory would have been whatever they did to him before placing him in the chamber. He suddenly passed out again.

I looked at the doctor to see a bead of perspiration running down her temple. Tall and perfectly formed, she was like every other Fystr I had ever seen with an extraordinarily beautiful face, set in stern concentration.

“I am sorry,” she said, some strain clear in her voice. “I thought he was far more stable than what we just witnessed. It is hard to get a true feeling while he is held in a coma, but please accept my apologies. I shall try once more to bring him around. Be prepared, I don’t know if he will have calmed any.”

Ogun’s eyes fluttered open once more, and this time he sat bolt upright, looking around angrily, his eyes falling on us. His deep voice boomed out, “What kind of trick is this now, Heiliun! How have you done this?”

“It's no trick Ogun, we are really here,” Ember whispered soothingly.

“You will find I am not so easily fooled. I can’t fathom how you created this illusion, but I will tell you no more!” he bellowed as he tried to pull his hands free of the restraints. “If this were real and not some mirage, why tie me up like a wild animal?” he snapped.

“To be honest, Ogun, it was a precaution. We didn’t know how you would be, if you’d take a dicky radge. I mean, you’ve been through so much and were a bit of a mess. It was hard to know if you’d still be yourself. You did just go fucking loco a minute ago, and you’d be trying to beat me like a drum if you were free to. Promise not to go apeshit and we can remove the restraints.”

He gave me a long look, then I felt him enter my head. I entered my Mindscape too. “Hey, dude, you have to know it's me now, right?”

He turned, tears in his eyes. “How? In all my long years I’ve nothing to explain this; how I could have woken up here surrounded by friends that should be dead. This does not make any sense after passing out in a room full of tormentors. I don't even know how to process this.”

“Try to stay relaxed, dude. It’ll all make sense when we go over it. You’ve been through a hell of a lot, Ogun, but you’re out of harm’s way now. You wanna come back out?”

“I am broken, Shaun,” he said before phasing out from my mind. I followed, not knowing how to feel either.

Ogun was speaking as I entered normal-state. “First and foremost, I would like to apologize for leaving you both. Though it may be of little comfort to you now, I felt real guilt afterwards. I came to find you, or at least what happened to you both. In the end I never made it to Xonico.”

“You don't owe us an apology, dude. It was a lose-lose situation. You did the right thing by leaving,” I admitted honestly. Then ruined it by adding, “That said, I was fucking livid for a fair while afterwards.”

He let out a tired laugh. “I’ve missed your straightforwardness, Shaun.”

“The truth is, a lot has happened since we parted, and now I can only sympathize with the impossible choices you’ve had to make. You didn’t have to free us from the lives we had, but you did,” I reassured him.

Ogun smiled, looking to Ember. “Okay, what have you done with Shaun?”

“He's definitely grown up since we last met. But don't worry, his core values are still there, like being an unpredictable gobshite and a lucky bastard.”

“That’s a relief. Don’t hold anything back, please, tell me how you survived Xonico?”

“Oh, that's an easy one.” She nodded at me. “Shaun annihilated most of their fighting men to the point where the cost was too high to keep standing against him. They released me to get him to stop. I suppose once you had left, and the Fystr had followed you, they had no reason to fight us anymore. I think in the end they had sympathy with our situation and kindly gave us a decrepit ship, before sending us on our merry way. Their leader entered coordinates into the ship's navigation system for a mercenary planet called Ipsis, where we might find a pilot.”

Ogun didn't really respond; he just smiled sadly and shook his head in disbelief. Ember continued her tale. “From there we’ve grown into something you couldn’t have dreamed, Ogun. On Ipsis we had a chance meeting with a Torax mechanic and pilot, kind of. Anyway, he was a lot better than us with the ship and became the first of what is now our crew. Through a turn of events, we took on a job transporting a Veilitian prisoner as a way to make some money. Turns out they’d been imprisoned purely to be sold as a slave.”

“Just another victim of corrupt assholes, throwing their weight around and getting away with it,” I interrupted.

“Long story short, we gained a second crew member with exceptional skills and experience.”

“And a metric fuck ton of money,” I added. “Still, that's not why we took them on. Their abilities are beyond awesome.”

Ogun raised an eyebrow at me.

“What Shaun is trying to say is that we ended up with two extremely useful crewmates with incredibly unique skillsets, and yes, an unimaginable amount of money. We also found another thing we all had in common: both their races experience problems at the hands of the Galactic Empire. With the newfound wealth, we had the opportunity to upgrade to a new ship and set about recruiting a crew to fill it. Starting with the Torax homeworld, where we were able to find