CHAPTER 6 TOUCH HER AND DIE #2
A sound from the doorway. Boots on the grating. Another guard, drawn by the impact, appeared in the threshold. He took one look at the scene and raised his weapon.
A Thermal-Prod.
The blue flare caught me on the left shoulder.
The pain was designed for my species. Thermal-Prods generated a targeted electromagnetic pulse calibrated to disrupt the Zethrani nervous system at the cellular level.
It hit my neural pathways and burned. Every sensory channel I possessed fired simultaneously, and the conflicting signals collapsed my motor coordination.
My hand released Harrick. My body locked. Muscles seized in contradictory spasms, and the world tilted as my knee gave and I went sideways.
A second charge. This one hit my ribs. The pain was blinding. White-hot and absolute, and it tore through the bond, and I felt Kira’s responding surge of panic, felt her fear for me rather than of me, and that distinction was the only thing that kept me from losing consciousness.
The guard with the Prod advanced. Harrick scrambled free, coughing, clutching his throat.
I got to my knees. The Prod had disrupted my coordination but not my musculature. The neurons were misfiring, but the muscles themselves were intact, and a Zethrani warrior did not need coordinated neural signals to stand. We needed will.
I stood.
The guard with the Prod stepped back.
“Leave.” The word came out broken. Distorted by the residual charge still arcing through my nervous system. But the sub-harmonics were intact, and the guard heard what lived beneath the word.
They left. Harrick stumbled through the door with his hand on his throat and his face the color of old bone. The guard with the Prod backed out after him, weapon still raised, and the door sealed behind them.
I stood in the center of my office. The Thermal-Prod burns were spreading through my shoulder and ribs in waves of contracting pain. My claws were still extended. My scales were still red. The combat response was receding, but slowly, like a tide pulling back from a shore it had tried to swallow.
The terminals were scattered across the desk. The chair was overturned. A crack ran through the wall sheeting where Harrick had impacted.
Kira was against the far wall. Her back pressed against the metal, her hands at her sides. Her lip was still bleeding. Her eyes were wide, and she was looking at me with an expression I could not read through the receding red haze.
Fear. She was afraid.
I had shown her the monster. The thing I had controlled for fourteen days, the thing I had pressed down behind discipline and duty and the careful retraction of every claw.
She had seen me tear a man off his feet and pin him to the floor and press my claws through his armor.
She had heard the killing register. She had seen the red.
I retracted my claws. The motion was labored, the sheaths protesting after the prolonged extension. The keratin slid home with a sound like a blade being housed.
“Are you hurt?” My voice was wrecked. Barely functional. “Kira. Tell me if you are hurt.”
She did not answer immediately. Her eyes moved across my face, my shoulders, the places where the Thermal-Prod had hit. The burns would be visible. Discoloration spreading beneath the scales, the tissue damage manifesting as dark patches where the bioluminescence had failed.
She pushed off the wall. Crossed the room. Stopped in front of me.
I braced for her to flinch. To step back. To look at me with the fear that would confirm what I had always believed: that the thing living inside me was not compatible with the tenderness she deserved.
She pressed her hand against the burn on my shoulder.
Her fingers were cool. The temperature differential, which had been pleasant two days ago, was now a balm. The damaged tissue screamed at the contact, but the bond pulsed beneath the pain, and her touch carried the resonance of something other than fear.
Anger.
“He hit you with a weapon designed to destroy your nervous system.” Her voice was low. Tight. The voice she used when a system failure threatened lives and the people responsible had not bothered to fix it. “You took two charges, and you stood back up.”
“You are bleeding.”
“I’m fine. It’s a split lip. You have electrical burns across your shoulder and ribs.” Her fingers moved along the edge of the discolored tissue. Diagnosing. The engineer’s touch applied to damaged biology rather than damaged machinery. “Can you feel this?”
“Yes.”
“How about this?” She pressed harder. The pain flared, and I locked my jaw against the sound.
“Yes.”
“Good. That means the neural damage is superficial. The prod burned your sensory channels but didn’t sever them.” She looked up at me. Her brown eyes held mine, and behind the clinical assessment was something else.
Something warm and fierce, directed at me with an intensity the bond amplified until it filled my chest. “You came back for me. You heard me through the bond, and you came back.”
“I will always come back for you.”
The words escaped without permission. The voice of a bonded Zethrani male speaking from the place beneath strategy and discipline and the careful construction of an identity built to survive captivity.
The simple, absolute truth that had been there since the Processing Room and would be there until the last of my neural pathways went dark.
She did not flinch.
She stepped closer. Wrapped her arms around my waist, carefully, avoiding the burn site on my ribs.
Her forehead pressed against my chest, against the scales that were still fading from red to violet, and her body was small against mine, and I felt her tremble from the aftermath of adrenaline leaving a system it had flooded.
I put my arms around her. My hands spanned her back. My claws were retracted and would remain so. The heat of my body radiated into hers, and the bond hummed between us at a frequency that said: Safe. You are safe. I am here.