Revenant Slaves Chapter 18: Chapter 17: Luna, End of Part 1 of Volume 1

Read chapter 18 of Revenant Slaves by Zee on NovelPedia.

Chapter 17: Luna, End of Part 1 of Volume 1 It was the fourth day of their voyage. Luna had just spent six hours doing exhaustive training with Avraham, three of which were at 1.3G, which meant she weighed more and got tired faster. She had spent many hours before that taking lessons from Riaz and Nico while strapped to her flight-couch. Apparently, her harsh tutoring sessions with Avraham had become the talk of the crew, earning her sympathetic smiles, back-pats in the corridors, and special treatment at mess halls and anywhere else she found herself on the ship. Luna would have given all that up for privacy during those lessons with Avraham, because for the crew, those were usually an unignorable spectacle on the long, boring journey they were on. Avraham was unusually hard on her. They practiced with weapons and also fought barehanded. Luna worked out harder than she ever had in her life. She learned to use exoskeleton suits, studied strategy, and anything else that struck Avraham’s fancy. He even took her outside the ship for zero-G maneuvers. They had been the scariest exercises of them all. The only separation between her and the cold void of space was her spacesuit, which felt too inadequate a shield. She had panic attacks twice outside the ship, causing her to lose her footing, and she would have drifted off into space had it not been for the safety cable that kept her latched onto the ship. After those unfortunate events, she found her food trays ridiculously overflowing with little packaged treats. She had the following seven hours free. She was meant to recuperate and rest during that time. Fortunately, this was also when the ship was accelerating at a comfortable 1G, almost the same as being back on her home world, which had 0.9 standard gravity. She shared the captain’s cabin with Avraham. It was the most spacious room on the whole ship, which really didn’t mean much, since it was just a small, claustrophobic cabin with two bunks and about three square meters of space besides. Avraham usually didn’t use the room when Luna was using it. Which relieved her greatly, because she had started dreading seeing his face these days, as it was usually accompanied by a tough lesson or a disapproving glare telling her not to waste time. Her favorite pastime was talking and getting to know the crew members, not just those on the command deck but from all parts of the ship. Today, she was too exhausted to head out of the room. She took off the mask and the wig she had been wearing and prepared for bed. There was a short chime on her HPC, her holographic personal computer. It was a message from Avraham. [Yelena, prepare yourself; I will be coming into the room shortly. There is something we must discuss.] That was ominous, Luna thought. What could it be that Avraham was breaking his own protocols to have this discussion in the confines of the captain’s cabin? She replied with a single-word response. [Acknowledged] Luna took a second to look at her mask and wig. Then she decided not to put them on again as a subtle protest against being disturbed in her free time. Avraham arrived a few minutes later. He asked for permission to enter the cabin once more after reaching it. After he entered, he took a look at Luna, and then at the mask and wig placed in plain view on the wall-mounted desk. If he had thoughts about it, he didn’t voice them, much to Luna’s annoyance. She had wanted to protest and win a point over her master, no matter how small. Instead, he took a seat in one of the crash couches bolted into the corner of the room and remained silent for a while. Each second, the silence stretched, and Luna’s apprehension grew. “What do you know of the soul?” Avraham suddenly asked. The question caught Luna off guard. Of all the topics she thought she would discuss with Avraham, the soul was not one of them. Gathering her thoughts, she answered carefully. “It is an unproven concept,” she said. “Something theorized to link the subconsci