My heart melted at how worried he sounded. All of them were so layered. It felt like I was always discovering new things about them. Thane’s concern over his mother's safety was just another layer. It had been a very long time since she had been any form of a parent to him, but I could tell that she still meant so much to him.
"Let's go," I said.
Thane and Derrial spent a few minutes mapping out a route to the facility. It was obviously a risk going there since it was a risk going anywhere public right now. They didn't think that the Council would put resources toward scoping out the facility, but you never knew. It was apparently common knowledge among the higher ups where Thane’s mom was kept.
We would have to don disguises when we went into the building though, just in case the staff had been alerted to our “most wanted” status.
Finally, we were off. Zipping through the Vepar sky, I watched the myriad of colors underneath us, I once again marveled at how I'd ended up on this crazy planet.
The trip was short. Only an hour passed before we were there. We stopped about a mile away so that the ship’s sensors could detect the area for any of the Council or its army. When none appeared, except one in one of the facilities’ buildings upstairs who had gone crazy, we flew in closer and landed in a patch of woods outside the facility.
Corran disguised me as a blonde with two Vepar horns the color of ebony coming out of my head. The guys disguised themselves as well and we left the ship. There was no way that anyone would recognize us in these getups.
I wasn't sure what to expect as we got closer to the building. We were about to walk into what basically amounted to a Vepar insane asylum. I wasn't sure what insanity looked like here considering I was pretty sure Zeni had been insane and she had still been allowed to roam free. Their standards for what counted as crazy must have been a little different from Earth’s.
From the outside the facility looked similar to other Vepar dwellings I had seen, except it was a lot larger. In fact, it was almost as large as the Khonsu arena had been. Except this was in the familiar dome-shape of most of the Vepar dwellings.
It was perfectly white on the outside, a light dusting of silver sparkles peeking out from the pristine whiteness. It was impossible to tell what the front of the building was and what was the back since there were no visible doors or windows.
I followed the guys to the building. We stood there in front of the blank wall, which I assumed had to be the front, and we waited. After what felt like ten minutes, I jumped back in surprise when a holographic image of a beautiful Vepar woman appeared in front of us.
"Please state your name," she said in a perfectly calm voice. The tone of her voice was so calm that it evoked images of meadows and rippling streams just by listening to it. It was the perfect voice for a place like this whose inhabitants were probably the opposite of calm.
"Aeryn," Thane said, not giving a last name. Corran had hacked into the facilities database when Thane’s mother had been first admitted and inputted several aliases for them all into the system. They now had several names with security clearances to be used with their different disguises. I guess the guys had always believed in being prepared.
“I'm here to see, Lania,” Thane continued, cutting off my thoughts. The hologram nodded.
"Please wait," she stated before disappearing.
Lania, that was a pretty name. I wondered if she and Thane looked alike.
I was nervous when a door appeared in the previously smooth wall and we walked in. Even though by the sound of it, Thane’s mother wouldn’t talk to me very much, I still had an innate need for her to like me.
The inside of the facility was the same stark white as the outside. Apparently the Vepar had come to the same decision as facilities on Earth, that the mentally ill needed the serenity of white rather than the chaos of the other colors.
We went down a long hallway with no windows or doors. There was no sign of anyone else although I thought I could hear faint yells and screams from beyond the walls. I started to feel claustrophobic. Corran must've sensed my distress because he grabbed my hand in his and squeezed it reassuringly.
After a time, we came to another wall and stopped in front of it. The hologram appeared again.
"Lania is having a good day today. Please be advised that she continues to suffer from intense hallucinations and is prone to outbursts of anger that can lead to physical violence. Today she has been allowed to freely move around her room. Please make sure that you are not carrying any sharp objects or other items that could be used as weapons," the hologram told us.
Thane’s body had stiffened at the robotic way that the hologram spit out his mother's medical information, like she wasn't a living being, just another statistic in a computer. I felt a rush of pity that I knew Thane wouldn't appreciate. What had his life been like, having a mother who suffered from issues like that?
It made me think of my own mother and the fact that she was still missing. Soft was what I thought of when I thought of my mother. Her voice, her mannerisms, the feeling of her skin. Everything about her had been soft and loving. I wondered if years of torture under the Khonsu had knocked that out of her. If she was alive, would she be joining Thane’s mother at a place like this?
I shivered just thinking about it. After Thane nodded his understanding and the rest of us all nodded as well, a door appeared in the wall. It slid open, and we walked into another white room. There was a white metal bed in one corner of the room. It looked like it had been wrapped in some kind of padding. I supposed so that she wouldn't be able to hurt herself on it. The room was empty of any furnishings besides a large screen that was embedded into one of the walls. On the screen played a slideshow of various images that I recognized as different places around Veon. Soft smooth music played from hidden speakers in the walls. And there, sitting on a white pillow on the floor in front of the screen, was who I assumed was Thane's mother.
She turned to look at us as we came in and her face lit up with a stunning smile. She was gorgeous, as were all the Vepar, but she had a certain look about her that was different from the other Vepar that I’d seen. There were deep lines around her eyes and her forehead unlike other Vepars. She also had a certain sadness in her stunning blue eyes, the same blue eyes that I stared into whenever I gazed at Thane’s face.
"Visitors," she said delightedly in a raspy voice that sounded more like it was a result of screaming than how her natural tone was. "I don't have visitors often," she said self-consciously, running a hand through her hair. "Don't mind the mess. I told Thane to pick up his toys, but you know how little boys are," she continued.
No one had mentioned to me that Thane’s mother was so far gone that she wouldn't recognize him. I watched the devastation flicker in Thane's eyes and saw how it turned into resignation. I suspected that he always held out hope that his visits would go differently than this and that she would actually recognize him.
"Little boys are mischievous," Thane told her softly. He approached her slowly, as if he were approaching a wild animal. He crouched down in front of her. She watched him; eyes wide. "How are you today, Lania. My name is Aeryn," he said in that same calm, gentle voice that sounded more like Corran than it did him.
"It's been an excellent day. I tended my flowers, I picked some food from the garden, Thane and I skipped rocks on the pond out back. My husband should be here soon. I'm sure you and him will get along wonderfully," she said.
Thane nodded. He continued to ask her questions, inquiring after her health and trying to get her to tell him how she was being treated at the facility. It was hard to do since she was stuck in an alternate reality. Not once did she ask him why he was visiting her. I wondered why that was.