Chapter 5
The Undoing
Horgox
The harness has not been fully off my body in forty years.
Pieces of it. I've stripped the outer casing, disabled the shock system, ripped the compliance chip from the back of my neck with a salvaged blade and hands that shook for an hour afterward.
The parts that could kill me, I tore out.
But the chest plate and spinal connectors remain, fused to implant ports along my spine, wired into neural pathways designed to carry pain directly to my brain.
The parts that hold me together, I can't reach.
ApexCorp built them to control me. They built them to last.
Krilly is three metres away, organizing tools on the flat stone surface.
Firelight catches the circuit tester turning between her fingers and the loose curls falling around her face.
She's rolled her sleeves up, forearms bare, jumpsuit unzipped to the collarbone against the cave's trapped heat.
The hollow of her throat gleams with a faint sheen of perspiration.
Watching her hands is safer than thinking about where those hands are going. Not by much.
"Before we start." The words scrape. "There's something you should know about why ApexCorp is hunting me this aggressively."
She looks up. Waits.
"When I escaped, I took data. Research files, financial records, evidence of their entire program.
Every facility, every specimen, every being they've modified and disposed of.
" My left forearm turns, exposing the thin raised line on the inside of my wrist. "It's here.
An implant I modified during imprisonment.
Biologically encrypted, tied to my genetic signature. If I die, it dies with me."
Her eyes track the scar. Back to my face.
"So they need you alive to recover it. Or dead to make sure it never surfaces."
"Yes. You're about to put your hands inside the technology they used to control me. You deserve to know the full cost of being near me."
She's quiet for a beat. Then she sets the circuit tester down, crosses to me, and drops to her knees in front of the moss padding where I'm sitting.
"Okay. Data implant, corporate conspiracy, galaxy-wide manhunt. Added to the list." Steady. Practical. As if I've told her the beacon needs a new fuse. "Do you want to do this?"
"Yes."
"Then show me the catches."
The outer straps come away with effort. Each one I peel back reveals skin that hasn't seen air in months, pressure marks worn into emerald flesh, pale scars where the material has abraded over years.
She watches me undress the harness with an expression I can't fully read: anger at what was done to me layered over something warmer that she's working hard to control.
The chest plate remains. Central housing, neural connectors, the components she needs.
"Here." I settle onto the moss padding before my legs can betray the unsteadiness. "Best angle from this position."
She kneels between my knees.
I stop breathing.
Her repair kit rests beside her, and she's reaching for tools with professional focus, all competence and determination.
She has no idea what she looks like from this angle.
Red hair catching firelight. Green eyes intent on my bare chest. Small capable hands steady despite the flush climbing her neck.
She leans closer to examine the plate's seams, and her forearm brushes the inside of my thigh.
Every muscle in my body goes rigid.
She's close enough that her scent cuts through the smoke and stone of the cave.
Sweat and engine grease and something underneath, something warm and specifically her, mixing with the heat radiating off my skin.
Varkaani senses run broader than human; I can smell the shift in her when proximity registers, the chemistry of her body adjusting to mine.
Below the leather panels of the harness that still shield my hips, my body has made its interest extremely clear.
Varkaani physiology runs hot. Right now, with her kneeling between my thighs and her breath ghosting across my exposed chest, I am grateful for every piece of armour still in place.
Grateful for the shadows. Grateful she's focused on the hardware and not on how the fabric of my pants has gone impossibly tight.
"Tell me if I hurt you," she says. Voice lower than usual.
Hurt me. As if that's what I'm afraid of.
"You won't."
Her fingers find the chest plate's seams. The first touch is clinical, her engineer's brain mapping connections and junction points. Even through the metal, the phantom heat of her fingers radiates into my skin. My hands fist against my thighs.
"There's a secondary lock," I manage. "Left side, under the main plate. You'll need to slide your hand beneath—"
She does.
Her palm flattens against my ribs. Skin to skin, slick with the heat, and she has to lean in close, her other hand bracing against my thigh for balance. Higher on my thigh. Her knuckles brush against the evidence of exactly how affected I am, and we both go still.
Her eyes flick down. Then up to mine. Wide.
Colour floods her face, spreading down her neck and disappearing beneath the open collar of her jumpsuit.
"Sorry," she whispers. But she doesn't move her hand. "I need the leverage to reach—"
"I know." Scraped out. "It's fine."
It is the opposite of fine. She knows. The flush on her cheeks says she knows, and she's choosing not to retreat, and that knowledge alone is nearly enough to break the last bracket of my control.
"Horgox." She holds my gaze, steady. "Do you want to stop?"
The check-in. The terms she set. Offered with the same professional calm she uses for everything, except her pulse is hammering in the hollow of her throat and I can see it.
"No." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Keep working."
She disconnects the first power node.
The sensation hits without warning. Not pain. The absence of pain, a connection that has carried agony into my neural pathways for decades as property going dark. What replaces it is release so acute that my entire body locks and a sound escapes my throat I couldn't reproduce if I tried.
Her hands still immediately. "Horgox—"
"Don't stop." Barely words. "Please. It's not pain.
It's—" I can't articulate what it is. Freedom isn't the right word.
Reclamation isn't enough. The pathway is silent for the first time in years of imprisonment, and every nerve ending in the surrounding tissue is awake, reporting sensation it has been blocked from receiving since I was young and strapped to a table in a facility that smelled like antiseptic.
"Tell me," she says. Soft. Not a request.
"Like you're undoing what they did to me. One connection at a time."
Her hands move again. More deliberately now. She understands what this is. Not component extraction. Not repair.
Reclamation.
The second node disconnects, and my forehead drops to her shoulder because I have used up every remaining unit of capacity to hold myself upright.
Her scent floods me. My hands find her waist, gripping carefully, anchoring to her while my nervous system cascades through decades in chains of suppressed sensation hitting all at once.
"Little flare." Against her shoulder. Barely a breath. Not a word I chose; something my body says before my mind can catch it, the way a hand reaches for warmth, the way a chest expands toward air.
I stiffen. The word sits between us. Exposed. Irrevocable.
She doesn't stop working. Doesn't comment. Doesn't repeat it back. Her fingers press fractionally warmer against my skin, and that is all.
"The final connection is deeper." Her voice has cracked. The first break in her composure, and the sound of it sends heat directly to places I am trying very hard not to think about. "I can't reach it from this angle. I need to—"
She shifts position. Rises on her knees. And before I can process what's happening, she's swung one leg over my thigh.
Straddling it.
To reach the deep junction where the chest plate anchors to the spinal connectors, she has to lean forward, pressing her hips against my leg. Her centre settles against the heavy muscle of my thigh as she stretches to reach around my ribs.
The heat of her. Through both our layers, through damp fabric and sweat-slick skin, the heat of her is specific and unmistakable. Warm and soft and pressed exactly where the captivity years of discipline and a hundred and twenty years of existence have not prepared me for a woman to be.
My hands move to her hips on instinct. Gripping. Steadying her for the work.
Keeping her exactly there.
"There," she breathes, and her voice shakes. "Almost."
She leans forward more to get the angle. Her weight settles fully onto my thigh, and I feel the slight rock of her hips as she adjusts for stability. The drag of her body against muscle I am failing to keep relaxed. The way her thighs grip my leg for balance.
My thigh twitches involuntarily beneath her, and the sound she makes is small and sharp and does something devastating to whatever was left of my self-control.
"Sorry," I manage. "Muscle reflex."
"It's—" She swallows. "It's fine. Just hold still."
Hold still. While she's straddling my thigh, while every micro-adjustment rocks her against me, while I can feel her heat and her weight and the precise geometry of where her body meets mine. Hold still.
Decades of captivity of arena discipline. This is harder.
She disconnects the last node.
Everything goes silent.
The entire pain network, years of violence of it, goes dark all at once. Not a cascade this time; a total shutdown, every pathway releasing simultaneously, and my nervous system floods with the raw, unfiltered sensation of being alive in a body that is no longer at war with itself.
Combined with the feeling of her against me, warm and present and real.