TONY
Tony wasn't overly enthused about working underground again. He hated not having windows, and he couldn't understand why William had decided to build his empire inside the mountain the village sat on top of, when he could have done so aboveground and enjoyed the near-perfect Southern California weather.
He did enjoy working with Kaia, though, and not because he still had a crush on her. She was a married woman now, or rather mated, but it was the same thing, and the truth was that he was no longer enchanted.
Yes, she was pretty. Yes, she was brilliant. A true prodigy. But his mind was full of a redhead that had taken him home last night and had shown him the meaning of pure bliss.
Being with Shira was revelatory. She was constantly smiling or laughing, and she didn't take anything seriously. She was a breath of fresh air, and being with her, he couldn't help but reflect on how different the experience had been with Tula.
Tula hadn't been happy. She hadn't been cheerful, and he'd always felt like he needed to walk on eggshells around her because she would fly off the handle over the most trivial things. He'd never felt at peace with her.
"Try substituting this symbol for a molecular weight designation." Kaia pulled him out of his thoughts, leaning over his shoulder to point at his screen.
Tony made the adjustment, and suddenly a string of gibberish resolved itself into something that almost made sense. "That's a protein folding sequence? But the values are off by an order of magnitude."
"Different base system." Kaia settled back into her own chair, tucking a strand of blond hair behind her ear. "Once you account for the conversion, it should line up."
She was right. "How long did it take you to figure that out?"
"Long. I've been banging my head against the wall for over a month." She smiled. "You're welcome for the shortcut."
He was helping Kaia to decipher texts written in an alien language and translate scientific notations into something comprehensible. It was tedious work, and he could never tell anyone about it or publish his findings in any scientific papers, but it was a pleasure to work with someone as brilliant as Kaia.
The decoding was painstaking work, requiring equal parts scientific knowledge and linguistic intuition, and it was intellectually challenging and deeply satisfying.
But today he found it difficult to focus.
His mind kept drifting to Shira, to the unexpected connection, and to Fenella's eerily accurate reading.
His Dormant potential was circumstantial but compelling. It had started with his connection to Kaia before his abduction, when she had still been human, and neither of them had known immortals existed. It continued to him ending up on an island full of them, and now he was living among another faction of them. The chain of strange coincidences that had led him here, to this village, just seemed too fantastic.
If the Fates the clan believed in existed, and Tony was beginning to suspect that they did, they seemed to have plans for him.
But if he was a Dormant, he needed to do something to kick-start his transition, and he wasn't sure what that something was. He'd heard bits and pieces about it during his time in the harem, but he'd deliberately avoided asking too many questions. The less he knew, the less they would have had a motive to kill him.
He turned to Kaia. "Can I ask you something?"
"What is it?" She didn't look up from her screen.
Tony swiveled his chair to face her. "It's about the transition into immortality."
That got her attention. She turned, her blue eyes curious. "What do you want to know?"
"Was it difficult?"
"Not really. It was quite easy for me, but that's because I'm young. Why?"
"I think I might be a Dormant."
She nodded. "It almost seems like fate was guiding you here."
"Yeah." He chuckled. "Isn't it strange that two scientists like us are talking about fate?"
"When the facts point at the impossible, our job is to find out why it is possible and not bury our heads in the sand."
He smiled. "So true. I should probably go for it. But I don't actually know what's involved."
Kaia's eyebrows rose. "You spent years on an island full of immortals, and you don't know how the transition works?"
