Chapter 9
The Vorrtan didn’t do small talk. He was really starting to like that about them.
Amaelii led him to a low table at the edge of her delegation’s area, close enough to the main hall that the hum of the reception still reached them, far enough away that no one would wander through.
Two of her males peeled off from the semicircle without being asked.
One brought a data screen while the other planted himself between the table and the crowd, a wall of red muscle with his back to them both.
Efficient. He nodded in approval; he could work with efficient.
“Warrior Vihaan.” Lady Amaelii lit the screen with a flick of one clawed finger, and a spinal column resolved in the air between them, rotating slowly.
“Third vertebral cluster, crush trauma. A landslide came down on his pack three years ago. He dug two of his brothers out before his legs stopped answering him.”
Kellat leaned in with a frown. The damage was old and ugly, the kind of injury that ended careers and, for most species, lives. Scar tissue webbed the injury site, thick and dense, choking off everything below it.
“He has no function below the injury?”
“None. We have kept him alive.” Her jaw tightened. “My healers tell me that is the extent of what they can offer him.”
“And you disagree.” He slid her a sideways glance.
“I did not become warlady by accepting the extent of what I am offered.” She flicked to the next file, and the display changed into a series of regeneration sequences, all time-stamped.
His pulse picked up as he watched a severed neural fiber knit itself back together in accelerated playback.
“Run it again,” he said, just to be sure he wasn’t imagining it.
Draanth. His eyed widened. He wasn’t imagining it. The Imperial healer corps had been chasing that exact result for longer than he’d been alive, and she had it sitting on a data screen like it was nothing.
“We do not graft new tissue,” she said. “We wake the body’s own repair mechanisms and aim them.”
“What’s the success rate?”
“In Vorrtan tissue, ninety-six percent.” She paused, watching him with those amber and turquoise eyes. “In Latharian tissue, we have never had a survivable result.”
Never? He blinked. Not poor results, not inconsistent… never. He looked at the imaging again, at that elegant cascade of repair, and the answer was sitting right there in front of him. Had been in front of him since he was a boy sneaking stories he wasn’t supposed to read.
“It’s the Tanel material,” he said.
The warlady went very still. Behind her, the male guarding the table turned his head a fraction, just enough to put Kellat in the corner of his eye.
“You know your history,” she said.
He inclined his head. “I do. Kayan Vorr built your people from the best of both Latharian and Tanel bloodlines. I’d always assumed the Tanel contribution was structural… your fighting form and the ability to switch to it.” He nodded at the screen. “But I’m guessing it runs deeper than that.”
“It runs through everything.” Her voice was flat.
“The regeneration is Tanel. The sequences that drive it, the repair architecture, all of it comes from that side of our inheritance. Inside a Vorrtan body, the combined genetic framework holds it in check.” The large scar on her cheek pulled tight as she looked directly at him.
“But inside a Latharian body, there is nothing to hold the leash. It does not recognize the tissue as part of itself. It regenerates nothing, but consumes instead.”
Draanth.
He kept his expression neutral while his mind raced.
He didn’t ask where they had gotten latharians to test this on, and he wasn’t about to risk a very shaky treaty by asking.
Regardless, the therapy and the threat were the same sequences.
Strip the Tanel material out, and the regeneration died with it.
Leave it in, and it ate any patient who wasn’t Vorrtan.
Now the documents he’d read before he arrived made a whole lot more sense.
Every redacted block, every schematic cut off at a crucial juncture…
the gaps sat exactly where the Tanel dependencies would be.
They hadn’t been hiding their advances out of arrogance.
They’d been hiding a weakness. Vorrtan medicine stopped dead at the borders of their own species, and she’d just handed him, someone who could parse and use it, that fact at a public reception.
Which told him exactly how badly she wanted what he had. And what she wanted.
“My paper.”
“Your paper.” She leaned forward. “A human brain that cleared dead tissue and rebuilt around it. Humanity has no Tanel material from what I can tell. And I checked all the records for the lost expedition that created them.”
Kellat blinked. “I’m not even going to ask how you got those.”
“Probably best you don’t.” She grinned at him, a sudden flash of sharp teeth. He knew she had a smaller, more latharian-looking form, so why did she use this one? Was it for intimidation… or to make a point?
“So they have no Vorrtan genetic framework,” she continued. “Do you see it? A solely Latharian-descended species, Healer, doing what my therapy does… on the inheritance we share with you.”
Her voice dropped, and there was hunger under it now. “Half of what we are is you. If that pathway exists on the Latharian side, then it has to exist somewhere in my people. Buried somewhere. And I want to find it and wake it. And then I want to rebuild this therapy without the tanel poison in it.”
He folded his arms over his chest. The science was sound, and Charlotte Mason was lying in his medical bay half a galaxy away with Scorperio scarring carved through her nervous system, and he had no Imperial treatments left to try.
“If I share the scans,” he said slowly, “Then I want your protocols. All of them. Targeting methodology, stimulation parameters, and all the failure data from the Latharian trials. My patient’s case is far too sensitive for half measures.”
“Done,” she said without hesitation, extending her hand across the table, human-style, and he wondered which briefing document she’d pulled that from. “My people will prepare the files. We review them together after the evening session.”
He took her hand. Her grip was cool and strong.
She didn’t let go. Instead, her thumb moved across his knuckles, slow and deliberate, and her gaze drifted over his face with an interest that had nothing to do with cellular imaging.
“Your human,” she murmured. “The little one with you. She is your mate?”
“She’s my guest.”
The lie was smooth and immediate, and as soon as the words left his lips, he kicked himself. It was the same lie he’d been excusing himself for before they’d arrived, and here he was doing it again.
Lady, he was such a draanthic.
“Interesting,” the warlady said, and released him. “I will see you at the evening session.”
“Of course,” he said, inclining his head. “I look forward to it.” Then he turned and walked away.
The main hall had gotten louder while he’d been occupied.
He cut through the crowd on autopilot, scanning.
It took him all of ten seconds to find her by the buffet table on the east wall.
She was alone, a pastry in one hand and that too-bright look on her face, the one that he was beginning to hate.
Oh draanth…
He’d left her standing alone in a hall full of strangers. The lie he’d told Lady Amaelii was still sour on his tongue, and the look on Delilah’s face said he needed to do something. Put this situation right. He started toward Delilah—
“Healer V’Raav.” A male stepped into his path.
Latharian, he was wearing formal robes and a researcher’s sash, dark hair in the style scholars had adopted to show it had never held a braid and they didn’t care who knew it.
His smile was polished to a shine. “I was hoping to find you here. I’ve followed your work for years. ”
“Researcher Z’Saai.” Recognizing the clan sigil on the researcher’s sash, Kellat returned the nod and kept his feet angled toward the buffet. “You’ll forgive me, I was on my way to—“
“Rivaan, please. Your paper on the human neural remapping.” Rivaan carried on like Kellat hadn’t spoken. “I’ve read it three times. Remarkable doesn’t cover it. A human brain reorganizing around dead tissue at that speed… tell me, is she enjoying the conference?”
Kellat froze and looked down at the researcher.
The published paper was scrubbed of any identifying information.
Age, origin, name, all of it had been stripped out.
It was standard practice for anything touching the Mate Program, or even humanity.
Nothing in his paper indicated that the subject was female, let alone that she was at the conference.
A guess. It had to be a guess. A healer arrives at a medical conference with a human on his arm… he kicked himself. Okay, it wasn’t a difficult deduction.
But the warning prickle crawling up the back of his neck didn’t ease.
“My companion is enjoying the buffet,” he said, his voice formal. “Your interest should be in my work rather than her.”
“Oh, absolutely, my apologies. I wanted to show you this.” Rivaan produced a dataflex from within his robes. “I’m working on link-band regeneration. You’re familiar with the interface scarring in drakeen pilots?”
Despite himself, Kellat looked at the screen.
Neural scans cascaded across it, and the pattern snagged him the same way Lady Amaelii’s imaging had.
Scar tissue targeted, broken down and cleared.
He frowned. This was a different mechanism entirely.
Where Lady Amaelii’s therapy woke the body’s own repair and couldn’t leash it, this one stripped the scarring first and asked questions later.
“You’ve found a way to clear it. How? Is it replicable?”