By night time the news about the leaders choosing me as the Prime Minister had already spread all around the Dominion. Not everyone was happy about the news, as expected, but to my great surprise, most people had reacted in a positive way to the news. In many places, people were celebrating my win, and the different networks were reporting the news in a positive way. People weren’t just accepting me, they were happy about me being their Prime Minister.
“It feels good to know that people love you and respect you, doesn’t it?” Kimball asked, and once again I had to wonder if he couldn’t read my mind.
“I wasn’t expecting such a positive response from them,” I said. We had just arrived to my office and were getting ready to start the day, but at the same time I was a little distracted by what had happened the day before. I had so many projects that I wanted to make reality, projects that I thought I wasn’t going to be able to work with, but that once again were in my hands, and it felt so good.
“You have done a good job and people love you. It’s the consequence of your actions. As long as you keep working for them, the people will keep supporting you. You can feel proud of everything you have achieved so far, and take the results of the elections as a validation of your good work,” I couldn’t help but smile at his words, grateful for having someone like him by my side.
The situation couldn’t be better, but suddenly I was hit by a bad feeling, the sensation so powerful that it was making me physically ill. I haven’t felt like that in a long time, and for a moment I expected an assassin to jump from the shadows and attack me, or maybe for the building to fall around me, but nothing was happening, which could only mean that the danger wasn’t there yet, but it was rapidly approaching.
“Something very bad is going to happen,” I told Kimball, but as always he could read me like an open book, and he was already moving closer to me to see what was going on with me.
“A vision?” he asked, but I could tell he already knew that wasn’t the case.
“Just a bad feeling, but a strong one. Something very bad is going to happen, or is already going on.”
Kimball went to work immediately. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but I knew he was working on reinforcing the security and covering all the different possibilities.
I wasn’t sure what to do, I could go into the fog, but I didn’t want to be in a vulnerable position in case something happened, the bad feeling was too strong and was distracting me, making it hard to know how to act. But even if going into the fog was too risky, I still had other options that would allow me to act, while still being aware of my environment, and one of them was astral projection, so I went to my seat and prepared to step into the astral planes. At first I stayed in the material plane, staying close while I looked for possible threats in the area around me. I usually asked for sentries to be posted in the astral planes, so once I made sure nothing was going on in the material plane, I moved down to talk to the sentry on the inferior plane, and then moved to do the same with the one in the superior planes. I went back to my body just a few minutes after I had left it and I found Kimball waiting for me.
“Everything ok?” I asked, the bad feeling as strong as before.
“I tried to get in contact with all our guards to let them know they needed to be extra alert, to let them know there could be danger.”
“And what’s the problem?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer.
“I couldn’t get in contact with the warriors that took Ethan to school this morning,” he said, before going silent, I knew there was more he wasn’t saying, and I didn’t want to listen, but he kept going, “the school doesn’t have any records of Ethan arriving this morning.”
“Maybe they’re still on their way,” I said, denying reality.
“He should have been there half an hour ago. When I talked to my people, they informed me that once they lost communication a new group was sent to look for them, but so far they haven’t found anything.” I felt sick, Ethan was in danger, again, and I had done nothing to stop it, I haven’t even seen it coming. I had failed him again. “Kaiserin, don’t worry, everything is going to be ok, I’m sure we will find him.”
I trusted Kimball, he knew what he was doing, and he had control over our resources and my people, I knew he had already contacted them, still I extended my mind to talk to Fatima, when I didn’t find her, I looked for Thalia.
‘Thalia? Are you with Fatima?‘ I asked once the contact was established.
‘I’m with her,‘ she confirmed, ‘right now she is in the fog trying to reconstruct what happened to Ethan and his guards. As soon as she gets out I will talk to you and give our report.‘
‘Thanks Thalia, keep me updated.‘
I felt like I needed to do something, but I wasn’t sure what, I couldn’t go to the fog, to look to the possibilities and explore the future Fatima was enough. It was tempting to loot to the future, but I knew that at the moment it was also a risk, I was too distracted with the bad feeling getting all my attention.
“You need to see this,” Ivan appeared in the middle of the room, he turned one of the monitors on and we found the blurred images of a group of people in the screen.
“… fooled us for too long. But the image she pretends to sell is just an illusion…” one of the masked men was saying.
“What is this?” I asked, the bad feeling getting worse, if that was even possible, as I watched the screen.
“It’s a broadcasting that started a few minutes ago,” Ivan said, “we think this could be related to Ethan’s disappearance.”
“… she has made us think she is a benign leader, that she worries about us, and she is even willing to sacrifice herself for us. She even made us think she was willing to leave her position as leader of the Dominion, but then she used her powers to force the leaders to vote for her.” Something in the way he was talking made me believe he could have been behind the whole election thing. “But once again we have the chance to show you that that woman is only interested in herself.”
“Have you tried to trace the transmission?” Kimball asked.
“We have people working on that, but you know that Fatima is one of our best tecnopaths and she is already working on Ethan’s possible kidnapping. We have other people working on that, but so far we haven’t been able to trace it.”
“I think that Fatima will arrive at the same place no matter what route she takes, I think that those people are behind what happened to Ethan. We need to find them as soon as possible,” and that would be possible even faster with my help, I was positive I could find Ehtan, and as soon as I had a better idea of what we were dealing with, I was going to go to the astral planes or go into the fog to find him.
“… has an option. She has until sunset to give up her position as Prime Minister and allow us to elect someone else, if she doesn’t,” the image changed and I could see Ethan there, tied up to a chair, “we will be forced to take an innocent’s life.”
“If you can call someone who shares that murder’s blood an innocent,” said another one of the masked men.
“Do you want to say something to your mother?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” Ethan said, his voice strong and with no trace of fear, “when you find them, show them no merc…” he couldn’t finish his sentence, and I could see his body tense and his jaw locked and I could tell he was in pain and trying to mask it. His eyes full of hate and he glared at the masked men was very telling, he wasn’t like that. Something very bad was going on there.
“We will be monitoring the networks, waiting for your official resignation. If we don’t see it, then young Ethan will die,” after that, the screen went blank for a moment and then started again.
“That’s a repetition of the message, I already watched that part,” Ivan said. “It seems we were right, they have Ethan. We will focus all our efforts in finding him as soon as possible.”
“I would tell you to focus all our efforts to find him, but now that I know what’s going on, I think I will be able to find him easily, but something else doesn’t fit, I got the impression they are trying to distract us. No matter how much they want to underestimate me, and no matter how much I tried to pretend I don’t care about Ethan, they must know that as soon as I get that message I will go looking for them,” the way I was feeling was telling me that I was missing something, that I needed to step back and get a good reading of the situation.
“I think the same. There’s something that doesn’t feel right about this,” Kimball agreed. “I think they want to distract us, keep us looking for Ethan while they do something else. Instead of focusing on Ethan, I want you to increase the security around the Palace. Close the place up and start a deep sweep of the place. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to look at the Towers and the school. Can you find for Ethan?”
“It’s easier to see the past in the fog, the path is already set, the problem with the future is that there are multiple paths and possibilities. If you give me a few minutes I can go back and see what happened this morning. Meanwhile, I want you to find Fatima and tell her to look to the future and what these people could be planning, it would be a waste of time if we are both looking at the same thing.”
“It seems like a good idea. I’ll start working on assembling a group to go looking for Ethan,” Kimball said. “I trust you will be able to keep the buildings secure.”
“Leave that to me,” Ivan said. “Anything you need, you know you only need to call.”
“I need to leave for a minute,” Kimball said, “Yoweri, keep Kaiserin safe while she is in the fog.”
“You can trust me,” Yoweri said from the corner where he had been all along, even if I had forgotten for a minute.
Going into the fog was always an interesting experience, time ceased to have meaning, no matter how much I knew that I needed to be fast. Finding Ethan’s path was easy, his life was entwined with mine. I could see a few other paths crisscrossing mine and trying to get my attention, but I focussed on Ethan’s, and found Fatima walking that path.
‘Kaiserin,‘ I could tell she was worried about something, ‘Thalia talked to me and let me know that you wanted me to see forward.‘
‘I think that our enemy is planning something big, and I want to know what.‘
‘Be careful with what you find, don’t let your emotion get the better of you,‘ she warned before walking forward in the fog.
I started to move, I decided I needed to see everything that had happened so I could have a better idea of what was going on. I walked to the moment they had been ambushed and watched as my men tried to defend Ethan, but had failed. I even saw Ethan trying to fight back, but they had used something that had put them out of combat. I watched as they executed my men, but I couldn’t stop and mourn them, I would give them the farewell they deserved once I made sure Ethan was safe. I watched as they took Ethan away.
Just as I had expected, they took him to a warehouse at the fringe of the city, since they didn’t have time to take him farther away. While I moved in his timeline I realized they it was a trap, and that the people that had taken him didn’t care who was hurt, as long as they could hurt me too. I could see that Ethan was in trouble, I could see they were hurting him, even as he did his best to stay strong. The last thing I saw was him, still tied to the same chair, apparently unable to move, but I could see something else was going on, his stare too intense.
After that moment in time his path started to branch off into multiple paths, so I knew that at least in the present, he was still safe, all I need to do was get to him, while avoiding all the traps they had set for me. It wasn’t an easy task, but I had to find a way to reach him. Once again, Ethan had ended in a difficult situation because of me, and I needed to right that wrong, no matter what I had to do, I would save him.
Kaiserin Novel 