Chapter Seventeen
Avena
Agasp caught in my chest as I woke with my hand closed around nothing. Declan’s hurt eyes lingered in my memory.
Air forced its way into me automatically before I could choose it. My back arched against the bed. White light burned behind my open eyes, though the room remained dark, and something cold pressed against my palm from the wrong side of the world.
Then my body remembered who controlled it.
I tore in another breath. The curved barrier beneath my hand became a sheet twisted around my fist. The six-second pulse receded from my spine until only my own heartbeat struck too quickly beneath my ribs.
“Primary synchronization has concluded,” Qelos said. “Your transition to waking consciousness was irregular.”
I pried open my fingers one at a time. No blue-white light moved beneath them. The absence should have reassured me. Instead, I remembered the way it had flooded my skin while Declan’s hand disappeared inside mine.
Then heat gathered behind my eyes. He had felt the cradle. Not remembered it. Nothing so removed. He’d felt it. Through me.
“Define irregular.” I pushed the question out, struggling to maintain my normally calm tone.
“Respiratory disruption, elevated pulse, sustained motor tension in the right hand, and a terminal increase in synchronization coherence.”
A second monitored cycle.
Selari would receive the pattern. She would see another increase at the final interval, just as she had after our first touch. Standard monitoring could not identify a cabin, a hand, a clinical chamber, or the expression on Declan’s face when he understood that I recognized what he felt.
It could still identify repetition.
“Did the increase exceed the intervention threshold?”
“No.”
“Would you like a detailed comparison with the previous cycle?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to notify the assigned technician of your waking symptoms?”
“No.”
“Would you like—”
“No, Qelos. Nothing.”
The room went quiet.
When I had returned to the cabin in severe gray clothing and my hair arranged tightly enough to hurt, I’d needed every visible line to hold me in place.
I’d only found the strength to return because I’d promised Declan.
I had entered determined not to look into his eyes until I knew how to speak without destroying the only freedom he possessed.
He heard the falsehood immediately.
I had taken it because standing apart from him had become unbearable. I needed the warmth of his touch, to know he was real.
I left the bed.
“Begin morning illumination,” I said.
Soft light rose across the walls.
“Current time is three hours and forty-one minutes before your scheduled waking interval.”
“I am aware.”
“Your recovery index indicates additional sleep is advisable.”
“I will not be returning to sleep.”
“Would you like the rest cycle formally terminated?”
There had been a time when I believed perfect compliance made me invisible. Selari had taught me otherwise. A pattern could be found in obedience as easily as defiance if someone knew where to look.
“Leave the cycle open,” I said. “Prepare a standard stimulant beverage at the lowest approved concentration.”
“A stimulant during an incomplete recovery interval may increase emotional volatility.”
“Prepare it.” The irritation in my voice was too obvious to misclassify. Qelos would retain the deviation whether it informed me or not. The absence of concern should have concerned me.
“Confirmed.”
I did not touch it. Not yet.
“Open my most recent exchange with Sir Vaeron.”
His answer appeared above the table.
“Send a request for an immediate private visit regarding Cultural Object E-441.”
“That file is resolved.”
“I am aware.”
“A reopened evaluation will create a Ministry activity record.”
“Do not reopen the file. Send the request as written.”
“Confirmed.”
Vaeron replied before I completed the breakfast I could not taste.
Come before the city wakes.
Vaeron opened his door before I touched the announcement panel.
He wore a dark robe secured carelessly over one shoulder.
His white hair lay flat on one side and lifted in uneven strands on the other.
He looked older than he had during my first visit.
Perhaps the hour exposed what daylight and dignity usually softened.
“Has the compass found another reason to offend the Ministry?” he asked with a slight smile.
“No.”
“Pity. I believe it has a talent for that.”
He stepped aside when I did not respond.
Ilyra was not present. I was relieved, then ashamed of the relief. She had shown me no reason to distrust her. I had simply reached the point where one witness felt dangerous enough.
Vaeron led me toward the low table. “Tea?”
“No.”
“That confirms the emergency.”
I remained standing.
He lowered himself into the chair with both hands on its arms. The movement took effort, and he did not disguise it. “Ask your question, Avena.”
The generic one I had prepared on the transport dissolved and another took its place.
“Can an Anchor dream?”
“You know the approved answer.”
“I did not come for the approved answer.”
“No.” His gaze settled more heavily on me. “You did not.”
He indicated the chair across from him. I sat because my legs had begun to feel unreliable and I would not allow him to notice.
“The Dominion says an Anchor lacks the integrated cognition required for dreaming,” he said. “It also says humans volunteered for preservation, experience no distress, and provide a biological function without meaningful subjective loss. Which of those statements are you asking me to defend?”
“None of them.”
“What did you see?” he asked.
“A man.”
Vaeron waited.
“In the lower level,” I continued. “Inside the cradle.”
His attention sharpened. “You entered the Anchor chamber.”
“The technician left the service access open.”
“That explains how. It does not explain why.”
“I believed the synchronization might be interrupted.”
“And you wanted to protect it.”
“Yes.”
The admission exposed more than I intended.
Vaeron looked toward the paper books lining the wall. “What did the man do?”
“He breathed.”
“His fingers moved. The system registered a neural response and labeled it expected. The display still reported no cognitive activity.”
“Of course it did.”
“Do not say that as if I should have understood sooner.”
Vaeron looked back at me. “I was saying it as someone who once needed too long to understand the same thing.”
The gold faded, leaving only heat behind.
“There is more,” he said.
It was not a question.
“I knew him.”
Vaeron became completely still.
“From where?”
“The synchronization environment.”
“The recurring figure,” he said.
“He is not a figure.”
“No,” Vaeron said softly. “I do not imagine he is.”
I hated him for agreeing without resistance. I hated myself more for needing him to.
“He was there before I knew the Anchor possessed a face,” I said.
“He believed the environment came from his own damaged mind. I believed he could be a construction generated by synchronization. He remembers things I do not know. He misunderstands information I have not given him. He waits when I am not present. Objects from my waking life appear there without passing through the residence. He—”
My voice failed on the smallest word. Vaeron did not rescue me from it.
“He has a name,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Declan.”
Speaking his name in the waking world changed the room. Changed everything. It was no longer a sound permitted only beside frozen water and repaired wood. It belonged here too, beneath the Dominion sky, in a house where another person could hear it and know I was not alone inside what had happened.
“Declan Shaw,” I said. “He was a military captain. He remembers a human neural communications program, an incoming handshake, and an attempted cutoff. His memories are incomplete.”
Vaeron stared at me. I had seen him amused, patient, tired, and briefly irritated. I had not seen him shocked. Until now.
“A conscious Anchor has never entered a Steward’s synchronization,” he said.
“Never?”
“Not in any record I was permitted to read. There were anomalies. Emotional contamination. Persistent imagery. Attachment to generated constructs. Nothing that answered independently. Nothing with a name and history.”
“Perhaps those records were incomplete.”
“They were Dominion records. Incompleteness is often the point.”
The answer should not have comforted me. It did.
Vaeron leaned forward. “Does Declan know what you are?”
“No.”
“Does he know he is beneath your home?”
“He knows his body may be somewhere else. He has experienced portions of the chamber—hard light, assisted breathing, cold along his spine. He did not know what they meant.”
“And now?”
The cold barrier returned beneath my palm.
“Now, he knows I observed something.”
Vaeron waited again.
“I returned to the environment after seeing him. I could not look at his face. He asked whether I had learned something, and I told him no.”
“Was that true?”
“You know it was not.”
“You came here prepared to hear a question in return.”
“I did not expect you to waste it on an answer you already possessed.”
“Then I will ask another. Why did you lie?”
“Because the synchronization is being monitored. Because if I speak plainly, the system may identify a change and Selari may order enhanced capture. Because Declan believes I am his equal in that place, and not that I am the Steward whose home is built over his body. Because he trusted me before either of us knew what that trust meant.”
Vaeron watched it without looking away. Without looking disappointed or disgusted.
“And because you are afraid he will hate you,” he said.
“That is not relevant to his safety.”
“It is relevant to yours.”
“I did not come here to discuss my comfort.”
“No. You came to ask whether Anchors dream because that question feels safer than asking what you owe a man who knows your name but not your place in his captivity.”
I stood so quickly the chair struck the floor behind me. The sound cracked through the room. Gold flashed beneath my throat. Vaeron did not move.
“I am trying to protect him,” I insisted, my voice strained.
“From the Ministry?”
“Yes.”
“From the truth?”
“Until I understand what speaking it may do.”
“And from you?”
The question found the exact place I had built every answer to avoid.
“When we touched, he experienced the chamber,” I said.
“His hand against the cradle wall. The six-second pulse. The breathing support. He felt it through me, or I gave it to him, or the system used what I saw to reconstruct it. I do not know. The environment destabilized. He asked if that was what I had seen.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“And then?”
“I woke.”
I did not tell Vaeron about Declan tightening his fingers around mine while the cabin broke apart.
I did not describe the way he called me back or the confusion in his eyes when I finally looked into them.
I did not say that grief had stripped every defense from me and left it visible for him to see.
I had only reorganized my waking life around returning to him, lied to Dominion authority to preserve our contact, entered the lower level because I could not tolerate losing him, and discovered that seeing his body made the continuation of my own perfect life feel obscene.
The distinction was becoming difficult to defend.
Vaeron rose slowly. He righted my chair before approaching me, stopping several steps away.
“When we entered Earth’s cities,” he said, “the Ministry told us humans were dangerous because instinct imitated reason. We were told their grief was chemical discharge and their loyalty a survival response. Then I watched a wounded man refuse water until the person beside him had been given some. There was no advantage in it. He believed he was dying.”
Vaeron looked down at his spotted hands.
“The doctrine survived because we needed it to. Not because it survived contact with a single human being.”
“That is why you refused an Anchor.”
“That is one reason.”
“There are others?”
“There are always others. Certainty is usually what people call a story after removing the parts that make them uncomfortable.”
I looked toward him. “Can you help me?”
His eyes closed briefly.
“I can help you ask questions the residence will not retain. I can tell you what I witnessed on Earth and what the Dominion removed from its histories. I may be able to learn whether anyone concealed a synchronization like yours.”
“May?”
“Age has made people careless around me, but it does not make me omnipotent.”
Under any other circumstances, the sentence might have drawn a smile from me. But now, my mouth did not remember how.
“What should I do before the next cycle?” I asked.
“I will not decide that for you.”
Frustration sharpened my voice. “You demanded that I question everything and now refuse to provide an answer.”
“I asked whether you had wondered. I did not ask you to replace the Ministry’s certainty with mine.”
“Declan may be harmed if I return.”
“He may be harmed if you do not.”
“That is not useful.”
“No,” Vaeron said. “It is only true.”
The mechanical clock ticked behind us.
Pause.
“I cannot lie to him again,” I said.
“Then do not.”
“I cannot tell him yet.”
“Then tell him that.”
“He already knows.”
“Knowing a person is silent is not the same as knowing they intend to return when they can speak.”
“If the Ministry identifies him as conscious,” I said, “they will take him from the system.”
Vaeron’s lined face turned even older.
“Avena, preserving the cabin is not the same as freeing the man inside it.”
I had no answer to that revelation.
“Go home,” he said. “Rest if you can. Stay awake if you must. But name the choice correctly, even if only to yourself.”
***
“Qelos, maintain full illumination,” I said.
“That setting may delay natural sleep onset.”
“That is the purpose.”
“Would you like the stimulant adjusted to account for your current fatigue?”
I picked up the vial. The liquid inside was colorless, exact, and approved. It would keep me awake without impairing work performance at the prescribed concentration. It would also keep me from the cabin. From Declan.
As I swallowed the stimulant, I told myself I was protecting him and learned the second lie went down easier than the first. And I could not go back until I had an answer to give him. Or at least one for myself.