Maris
Behind me, Thoryn’s breathing came in harsh, uneven pulls. The sound scraped against my nerves. Each ragged inhale reminded me he was suffering. His boots dragged slightly every third step. The plasma burn was worse than he’d admit.
The tunnel branched ahead. Left path descended toward the lower mining levels, unused for decades, probably unstable. Right path led to the old secondary fueling depot, abandoned when XyloCorp pulled out. Depot meant shelter. Meant I could stop moving long enough to think.
“Right.” My voice came out flat.
Thoryn didn’t respond. Just followed. The heat rolling off him was wrong, even from two meters away.
The depot entrance appeared around a sharp corner, exactly where my mental map said it would be. Heavy blast door, rusted at the edges, covered in decades of grime. I keyed in the old override code.
The lock cycled. Green light. The door ground open on protesting hydraulics.
Inside, the depot was exactly as terrible as I remembered.
One large room, carved from raw asteroid rock.
Emergency lighting strips along the ceiling cast everything in dim, flickering amber.
Crates stacked along one wall. A rusted maintenance console.
Two metal cots bolted to the floor. The air felt heavy with the smell of old coolant and abandonment.
But it had independent life support. The gentle hum told me the system still functioned.
Good enough.
I turned to secure the entrance. Thoryn swayed in the doorway. His weight shifted wrong. Catching himself. The smear of blood on the door frame behind him glistened wet and dark.
“Sit.” I pointed at the nearest cot. “Now.”
He moved toward it. Three steps. His entire body seized on the second step. He made it to the cot and collapsed more than sat, the metal frame groaning under his weight.
The whole right side of his vest gleamed dark and wet.
I dropped my pack. Yanked out the medkit. My hands moved through familiar motions. Focus. Fix the immediate problem.
“Vest off.” I crossed to him, kit in hand.
He fumbled with it, his left hand shaking. After five seconds of watching him fail, I batted his hand away and released the clasps myself. Peeled the vest off. He hissed when the material pulled away from the wound.
The plasma burn looked worse up close. Much worse.
The scales across his entire right shoulder had melted together into a grotesque mass, gray and black and oozing.
The synthetic fabric from his undershirt had fused into the charred tissue.
The heat radiating from the wound felt like an open furnace against my palms.
“This needs a medical bay,” I said. My voice stayed level. Clinical. “Real regeneration tech.”
“Don’t have time.” His voice scraped out. “Need to keep moving.”
“You can’t move like this.”
“Can.”
“You’re burning up.”
“Trauma response.” He managed to focus on my face. Those amber eyes were wrong. Too bright. Pupils blown wide. “Runs hot when healing. Normal.”
Nothing about this was normal.
I grabbed the bio-sealer from the kit. Then the plasma-cauterizing pads. Two left. And the coolant gel. One tube.
I started with the coolant gel. Squeezed the tube, spreading the thick blue paste across the worst of the burn. The gel hissed on contact. Steam rose. Thoryn went rigid. His left hand gripped the edge of the cot, claws extending involuntarily, punching through the thin mattress.
“Sorry.”
He didn’t respond. Just breathed. In. Out. Controlled.
I applied the cauterizing pad next, pressing it firmly over the gel-covered burn. The pad activated on contact, sending targeted energy pulses to seal the damaged blood vessels. The pad glowed red, then amber, then green. Sealed.
The bio-sealer came last. I sprayed it over the pad, creating a protective layer.
My own hands were shaking. Just slightly.
Thoryn was still rigid. Still locked in that terrible stillness. Sweat ran down his neck.
My hand, the one not holding the sealer, lifted. An old, forgotten instinct. To brush the sweat from his temple. My fingers hovered, a centimeter from his skin.
He let out a choked sound, a gasp of pure agony from just the intent of my touch.
I snatched my hand back. But I SAW it. Just as he seized, right on his temple. A single scale flashed a deep, perfect emerald for a fraction of a second before the sick gray-green drowned it. A glitch. A data ghost. I dismissed it and stepped back.
Poison. My proximity was poison.
I stepped back. Fast. Put two meters of space between us.
He sagged immediately. The rigid stillness drained away, replaced by exhausted slumping. His breathing evened out.
The bond. That’s what he had said. Proximity to me caused him agony. I’d been standing right next to him for five straight minutes while I worked on his shoulder. Forcing him to endure not just the burn treatment, but the bond pain on top of it.
Exhaustion hit me. I sat on the opposite cot. The metal frame creaked.
I pulled out my datapad and the data chip from the shipyard. My hands were still shaking. “Time to see what we’re paying this price for.”
I slotted the chip. The decryption finished. The file opened. It was exactly what Thoryn said it would be: shipping manifests. Just dry data. Routes, dates, call signs.
I scrolled through the list, my stomach tightening. “This is it. These are the runs. Call sign ‘Venture,’ ‘Lucky Star’... all mine.”
I found the cargo codes. “Restricted Medical,” and over and over again, “Specimen - Bio-Sample.”
I looked up at him. “This is just what I told you. Dry data. Routes and cargo codes. It doesn’t prove anything.”
Thoryn had gone still. “What was that last code?”
“Specimen - Bio-Sample. So?”
“The data Deyric found,” he said, his voice rough. “The Synthesis Project... it was all built around ‘Bio-Sample’ acquisitions. We suspect it wasn’t just samples , Maris. They were subjects.”
The words just hung there. My datapad felt impossibly heavy. I looked back at the screen, at the long list of shipments. ‘Bio-Sample’. Not samples. Subjects.
“I transported people.” The words came out flat. Simple fact. “I shipped sentient beings like cargo.”
I was a slaver.
The thought looped through my brain on repeat, mechanical, relentless.
Every breath tasted like failure. My fault.
All of it. All those runs I’d made, moving crates of “restricted medical supplies.” Premium rates because the cargo was sensitive.
Don’t ask questions because the clients paid for discretion.
I’d been so proud of myself. Building a legitimate shipping business. Taking corporate contracts.
“Stop.” Thoryn’s voice cut through my spiral. “Can hear you thinking from here.”
“You can’t hear thoughts.”
“Can hear breathing. Yours changed. Faster. Shallower.” He paused. “Guilt pattern.”
Of course, he recognized my guilt breathing.
“I transported them.” The words came out flat. “I moved the cargo that... I was a tool for slavers. That’s not guilt. That’s just reality.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It matters.”
“To who?” I looked at him across the small room. He still looked like he was in agony. “The people in those containers don’t care that I didn’t ask questions. They’re still... wherever they are. Because of me.”
“Because of the Consortium.”
“Using my ships. My routes. My manifests.” I pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them. Smaller. Contained. “I should have known. Should have looked closer. Should have—”
“Stop.” Firmer this time. Almost a command. “Second-guessing decisions from years ago while running for your life is a waste of time. You didn’t know. The Consortium hid it deliberately. Blaming yourself won’t help them.”
He was right. It didn’t help. But I couldn’t stop seeing that cargo code. ‘Subjects’. I transported subjects for their ‘Synthesis Project.’ All those years... what were they doing to them? What kind of ‘synthesis’ requires shipping people in crates?
My gaze snapped to Thoryn. To the flickering, sick-gray scales. The pain lines etched around his eyes. The way he flinched when I got too close. He was a prisoner for eight years. They didn’t just hold him.
“They... they tested on them, didn’t they?” My voice came out rough. “The subjects I transported. For the project.”
He went completely still, his posture defensive.
“They tested on you.” My voice was flat. A statement, not a question. “That’s what this is. You weren’t just a prisoner. You were a subject.”
I stood up, crossed halfway to his cot, stopping when he tensed. “What did they do to you, Thoryn? What ‘synthesis’ did they try to pull on you?”
Silence. Long enough I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he spoke, voice rough and low.
“They tried to break the bond. Make me a weapon without weakness.” He stared at his hands.
“Standard procedure for captured bonded subjects. They want soldiers who can’t be compromised.
Can’t be leveraged.” He stopped. Started again.
“They tried to sever the connection between me and you. Completely. Eight years of experiments designed to burn out the bonding mechanism.”
My stomach felt cold. Eight years. He’d been captive for eight years. I’d known that intellectually. Hearing him say it made it real.
“It didn’t work,” he continued. “Tamzari bonds are... stubborn. They couldn’t break it.
So they tried to twist it instead. Rewire the pathways.
Make proximity to a potential mate trigger pain responses instead of bonding responses.
” He finally looked at me. Those too-bright amber eyes. “They partially succeeded.”
Potential mate.
He’d said it. Not partner, not lover. Mate.
The word was clinical, cold, but it landed. He was talking about me. I’d always known what we had was... deep. But I’m human. He’s Tamzari. I’d never let myself think about what that... meant.
That the bond was biological. Real.
Real enough for them to spend eight years trying to break it. And now it was killing him.
My brain skipped right over the implications. I couldn’t process it. I latched onto the only part I could.
“Partially.”
“The bond is still there. Still trying to complete itself. But every time I get close to you, every time my body tries to initiate the bonding process, it triggers the new pathways they installed. The pain pathways. My body wants to bond. My altered biology punishes me for trying.”
I processed that. Forced myself to think through it. “So being near me hurts you. Being far from me leaves the bond incomplete, which also hurts. There’s no distance that doesn’t cause pain.”
“Correct.”
“And you came anyway.”
“Yes.”
“You-...” I had to stop. “You walked into my cantina knowing you’d be in agony for every second you spent near me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” The word ripped out of me. Too loud in the small space. “Why would you do that to yourself?”
He met my eyes directly. His body was still, but I could see the tension in his shoulders, the effort it took to just sit there.
“They failed,” he said simply. “They tried to break me. Burn out what I felt for you. Turn you into nothing in my mind. Make me not care.” He paused. “They failed. You’re still... my weakness. Always were. Still are. They just made sure loving you hurts.”
The words hit me. A confession of specific, prolonged, calculated torture designed to weaponize connection. To turn love into pain. To make the thing that kept him alive through eight years of hell into the thing that destroyed him now.
He’d survived by holding onto me. And now I was killing him just by existing near him.
The guilt from the manifests... that was already crushing me. This was worse. This was personal. This was my presence causing him constant suffering.
“You should have stayed away.” My voice came out strangled. “You should have let them kill me. It would have been easier. For you.”
“No.”
“Thoryn—”
“No.” Absolute. Final. “I didn’t survive eight years of them trying to burn you out of me just to stay away when I finally found you alive. Don’t care about the pain. Don’t care about the damage. Don’t care—” He stopped. Breathed. Controlled himself. “You’re worth it.”
I stared at him. This massive, scarred, broken warrior who’d endured eight years of torture. And he’d come anyway. Was sitting here now, fevered and bleeding and locked in constant agony, telling me I was worth it.
“I’m sorry.” The words felt pathetic. Insufficient. “I’m so sorry.”
The silence fell again. Heavier than before. Suffocating.
Inventory: One trafficker. One broken bond. Zero solutions. Infinite guilt.