Chapter 12
Danitalin
“I’ll have to call this in,” Jaxin said from just ahead of me.
He was holding a branch aside for me to pass more easily, but he did it with an expression that seemed to convey boredom.
I nodded, slipped past him and the branch, and kept walking with my head high.
I got what I wanted, Jaxin had not once protested that the flowers were out of our way—so why did I feel like this call was going to put a wrench in things?
I was right, but I did not realize how closely Jaxin was tied to the Roka blight until he made a vehement denial to the harsh male voice on his com.
“Negative, Captain. We’re going. This is too important an opportunity to let pass.
Besides, what else can you do? You’re still negotiating our retrieval with the Kertinal, so that gives you an extra day to get it squared away. ”
They were going back and forth like that, but Jaxin never unbent from his stance.
To my shock, he grew more and more vehement with each new round of arguments.
Anger was definitely flaring beneath his rigid control, along with another twinge of pain in the vicinity of his chest. From his face, you would never be able to tell, but he raised his voice, grew sharp and fierce, and my empathic gift was glowing with the feeling by the time the call wound down.
Not just a subtle hint of anger—a taste beneath the control—but full-blown rage.
I had not realized I’d frozen in place to stare at him, halting us in our tracks as he finished his argument with his captain.
I did not even become aware of it until Jaxin reached out to cup my face with one hand, his head cocked at an angle, and something that could very well be a smile slowly spreading across his alien face.
“We got what we wanted, little one. Now let’s get a move on, shall we? ”
Little one? That wasn’t just an intimate, strange shortening of my name, that was something a lover might say.
Heat coiled through my stomach and washed up my neck to warm my cheeks, too.
I liked that far too much, for Jaxin to call me things no one else ever would.
I decided I couldn’t ask him about this either, not yet, because he might never call me “little one” in that husky voice again if I did.
“Why does this matter so much to you?” I said, as I allowed him to turn me on the path and usher me forward to resume our trek. Now I was in front of him, which meant I got to set the pace. It also meant I kept feeling his eyes on my back—a tingling along my spine from how aware I was of his body.
“What makes you think it does?” Jaxin evaded.
He was back to sounding calm, to feeling just like any other Rummicaron, but I no longer believed he, or perhaps any of them, were without feeling.
I tilted my head to glance at him over my shoulder and discovered that he’d dropped his gaze down to his feet as he walked.
Or maybe that wasn’t his feet he was watching but my ass.
“You are talking to a powerful empath, and I’m no longer burned out like I was yesterday.
” No, I was not at full strength yet, but I was definitely recovering, and far quicker than I normally would.
He was soon going to be unable to hide the massive secret he was carrying: that he felt.
Then I thought about my time on the Rummicaron world, where I’d seen the effects of Roka production.
I had never once felt rested or gotten a sense that anyone there felt.
So what if it really was just him? This seesawing over what I knew, what I should or shouldn’t ask, it was exhausting.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Jaxin said, regarding my statement about my gift.
But I knew that he understood, I could see it in his eyes and sense it in the soft, muted tingle of panic that danced across my senses.
He was scared that I’d find out what he felt; he didn’t want to admit that he could not successfully mute his feelings.
Perhaps such an inability was a major flaw to a Rummicaron, but I was beginning to believe it was a gift.
Even as overwhelmed, as inundated with feelings not mine as I often was, I knew the value of emotions.
“It means that I knew your anger when you felt it,” I said.
“And my cure clearly means something to you, or you wouldn’t put us at risk to replace the samples I lost. Who was it?
Who did you lose?” I thought he’d bite my head off for asking that question, it sizzled in the air, a threat.
As quickly as it came, it faded, and he turned his gaze on the jungle that surrounded us.
I thought that meant he wouldn’t answer; he was very good at evading questions when he felt like it.
The words, when they came, were softly spoken, as if he wasn’t quite ready to utter them out loud.
“It was my sister. She raised me after both our parents perished from the effects. They both worked in one of the illegal plants on Rumcas. Bexlin couldn’t get work elsewhere either, as she was forced to drop out of school to care for me.
So she had to go to the plant too. It wasn’t long before she fell ill. ”
Though he told the story quietly, it was not fraught with emotion like others might be during such a recollection.
I tried to picture Jaxin as a young boy and simply couldn’t, but I felt my heart go out to him anyway.
First, he lost his parents to this blight, then his sister, it must have been incredibly tough.
As much as I’d been alone all through my childhood and my career, at least I’d always had people in my corner.
But I could already tell that Jaxin had been left with no one once his sister was gone.
“She knew she had to get us out of there,” Jaxin said, surprising me when he picked up the story in a brighter voice.
My senses warned me it was a false cheer, masking what he was truly feeling: grief and pain so deep it had never healed.
He’d never dealt with it because he’d been expected not to feel anything.
“Somehow, she got a job elsewhere, across the continent. We packed up everything we had, which didn’t amount to much.
I remember that we could carry all of it on our backs, even Bexlin, and she was already so frail and weak by then.
” Jaxin passed me on the trail, picking up the pace, as if he meant to outrun his past, but he kept talking.
“We boarded a ship in Rumcas, the capital, and sailed across the ocean to start our new life. Except… a storm struck, the ship went under, and everyone was forced to swim to shore.” He halted there, and I tried to imagine being a young child in the ocean during a storm.
It was different for a born swimmer like a Rummicaron, of course; they could dive deep, breathe underwater, and swim to safety.
Even as young as he might have been, he would have made it. Had made it.
“Bexlin was too weak, and I didn’t realize—didn’t see it—until it was too late.
One moment she was swimming behind me; the next…
she was just gone. So, you see? That’s why I’ll help you get your samples and help you make your cure.
The Rummicaron government does nothing because they do not care.
Someone has to help those who have no choice, like my family had no choice.
” He did not look at me as he said that, but the words sank into my bones like a vow.
“I ended up in an orphanage, then got drafted into the military as soon as I turned eighteen.”
When the silence began to stretch, I knew he was done telling me his story, and I felt that perhaps I owed it to him to share my own.
It was surprisingly hard to get started, and for a moment, I wished I could do as he did, push all the things I felt aside.
He’d told me about the Rummicaron mind exercises yesterday, ones they practiced daily to assert that cool, rational numbness.
It hadn’t worked for me then, but it definitely helped me feel calmer now.
“I wasn’t on Rumcas, but I imagine there are similar situations to yours on many of the Rummicaron worlds…
” I said. No, Rumcas was a major port in the Rummicaron empire, but the planet I’d visited on my aid mission with the Aderian relief troops had been far poorer—a backwater world nobody cared about, where Roka consumption was so huge that not only was the pollution from it terrible, but half the population was always drugged out of their minds using it.
Jaxin did not respond, so I soldiered on.
“It still haunts my dreams, the sight of the production mills and the strung-out people in the roads. So many sick.” I shuddered, the hacking coughs that had filled the air everywhere I’d gone echoing in my ears.
“I was supposed to help, but… the pollution was so heavy, there was nothing we could do. That’s why I decided to find the cure, to end that nightmare.
” I felt both selfish and proud for having made this my task, because I knew I did it for me as much as for them: to silence the dreadful coughing noises echoing in my dreams, to erase sunken, sallow faces and vacant expressions from my memories.
“This is why you rarely sleep well?” Jaxin asked.
He sounded grim now, but I didn’t feel anything from him.
Perhaps he was so used to the sights that haunted me, having grown up with them, that he really was numb.
Then again, the moment he’d learned this was about Roka pollution, he’d wanted to help me achieve my goal anyway he could.
I did not have to doubt, even once, that Jaxin wanted to use my cure—if I succeeded—to help everyone who needed it: for his parents, and for his sister, Bexlin, whom he had clearly adored, even if his voice had not reflected that when he spoke her name.