Page 45 of Dark Rebel’s Reckoning (The Children Of The Gods #93)

45

DROVA

D rova glared at the algebra problem as if it had personally insulted her lineage. The human in the YouTube video kept talking about isolating variables and moving numbers from one side of the equation to the other, but his words might as well have been in Chinese for all the sense they made to her, and Chinese wasn't one of the languages programmed into the translating earpieces.

"So, if we have 3x + 7 = 22," the cheerful instructor said, "we first subtract seven from both sides to get 3x = 15, and then divide both sides by 3 to get x = 5."

She paused the video and attempted the practice problem: 4x - 9 = 15.

"Okay, so I need to add 9 to both sides?" she muttered, scribbling on the notepad beside her. "No, that's not right. Subtract? No..."

With a frustrated sigh, she tossed her pencil onto the desk. Parker's textbook sat beside her tablet, its pages still crisp and barely touched. She'd tried to learn from it, but the dense paragraphs and neatly arranged formulas swam before her eyes after just a few minutes. At least with the videos, she could pause, rewind, and hear someone explain the concepts out loud over and over again.

Was she dumb, or were Kra-ell incapable of learning algebra?

Perhaps the gods had been right in restricting the Kra-ell access to their higher learning institutions. Perhaps the reason wasn't discrimination and the wish to keep the technological advancements to themselves, but that Kra-ell brains were not built for studying. They were warriors, hunters, and that was what they were supposed to do. They weren't meant to sit on their asses in classrooms.

Her wound throbbed dully beneath the bandage, a reminder of her failure during the mission. But that hadn't been the worst thing. Losing that loudspeaker had been by far her greatest failure. She'd let everyone down, but their team had persevered anyway.

She'd messed up, but thank the Mother, the rest of the pureblooded Kra-ell females along with Dima and Anton had been awesome.

Still, Drova's confidence was crushed, and the damn algebra wasn't helping to boost it.

A sharp knock on her door pulled her from her self-pity fest, but before she could respond, the door swung open, and Jade's figure filled the entrance.

"What are you doing?" her mother asked, her eyes taking in the scene—the tablet, the scattered papers, the textbook.

Drova resisted the urge to close the video. "Studying," she murmured.

Jade arched a brow. "By watching a video?"

"It's a class. An instructional video." Drova gestured to the tablet. "Parker said I could find classes on YouTube if the book was too difficult. And trust me, algebra is just mind-numbing."

To her surprise, Jade nodded approvingly. "Adapting to overcome obstacles is a good strategy." She walked into the room, her gaze shifting to the algebra equation on the screen. "I applaud your initiative. This looks like a foreign language to me."

It was on the tip of Drova's tongue to ask her mother whether the Kra-ell had something equivalent to algebra and whether kids learned it at school, but she was afraid to ask in case her mother confirmed her suspicion that the Kra-ell were too dumb to learn things like this.

As long as it was just her, she could live with that, but she refused to believe that her entire race of people was either incapable of, or had difficulty with, learning what every human runt had no problem with.

"I'm going on another mission tomorrow," Jade said. "That's what I came in to tell you before I got distracted. We are going to Iran to rescue more likely Dormants."

Drova straightened, her wound momentarily forgotten. "Can I go with you?" It would be much more fun than what she was doing now.

"No." Jade's tone left no room for argument, but Drova had never been one to heed such warnings. "Your wound is still healing."

"I can help," she insisted. "My compulsion ability isn't affected by the injury."

Jade's expression remained impassive. "The mission parameters do not require your specific talents."

"That's ridiculous," Drova countered. "Compulsion is always useful."

"Not for this operation." Jade sat down on Drova's bed. "It's a simple extraction. The targets are more of Kyra's relatives. Her sisters and their offspring."

"Wait a minute." Drova lifted a hand. "Are the girls we rescued her relatives as well and she didn't know?"

"They are her nieces, daughters of her sisters, which makes them Dormants, and that's why the Doomer abducted them. The diagara wanted to create his own breeding program so he could amass his own army of immortal warriors."

"Wow," Drova mouthed. "That's even worse than what we imagined. But didn't we kill all of his underlings?"

"Apparently not. He told Kian and Toven that he sent people to get more of Kyra's relatives, who are also Dormants since Kyra has only sisters. Four of them."

Excitement flickered through Drova. "That's actually good. If the girls are Dormants, they will come to live in the village. I was worried about what would happen to them. I thought maybe Kian would send them to the sanctuary for Vanessa to take care of. They are no different than other trafficking victims."

Jade nodded. "You are right, but since they are Dormants, I have no doubt that they will come straight to the village. They will probably need a friend." She gave her a meaningful look.

Drova snorted. "And you think I'm the right person for that? Remember what happened the last time I befriended clan teenagers?"

She'd used them, compelled them to do things they would never have done on their own, and when she'd been caught and they had to determine her punishment, they had gone too easy on her, had been too forgiving. Perhaps that was why she was inflicting on herself the torment of algebra even though Kian pardoned her sentencing.

"That is in the past," Jade said. "These girls will be new here, and they have no preconceptions about you. On the contrary, you were part of the team that liberated them. They probably think of you as a hero."

"They have eyes, don't they?" Drova gestured to her face, with its pronounced Kra-ell features. "They'll be scared of me."

Something softened in Jade's expression, revealing a rare glimpse of the maternal concern she usually kept hidden beneath her warrior's exterior. "I think you're the one who's scared, Drova. We're born warriors, you and I, and fighting comes naturally and easily to us. It's the other things, the softer emotions, that challenge us. But if you want to become a leader one day, you need to confront obstacles and embrace challenges that lie outside your comfort zone." Jade rose to her feet and cast a glance at the video still playing in the background without sound. "I believe you already understand that."

Long after her mother had walked out, her words still echoed in Drova's mind.

She'd faced far more terrifying adversaries than four traumatized teenagers, but there was something about the prospect of friendship with them that felt more dangerous than any battlefield.

In combat, the rules were clear. Victory or defeat. Life or death. But friendship with humans who had never even heard of Kra-ell? There was no training manual for navigating those unfamiliar waters.

With a sigh, Drova returned to her abandoned algebra problem: 4x - 9 = 15. She stared at it, the numbers swimming before her eyes.

"Add 9 to both sides," she muttered, pencil hovering over the paper. "Then 4x = 24. Then divide…"