Chapter Thirty
Declan
My hand closed. My real hand. In a room I couldn’t see.
Pain tore through my knuckles. The cabin floor hit my knees a second later, hard enough to send the overturned chair scraping toward the fireplace.
For one impossible moment, I had been somewhere else.
White floor flashed under rough wool. Pearl walls shone behind cedar logs. Avena fell between a table and a glass cylinder that held my body. Her palms struck the floor and gold light broke beneath them like cracks in ice.
Then the cabin had slammed shut around me.
I stayed on my knees and held my right hand in front of my face. It looked the same as it always did here. Broad palm. Short nails. A pale line at the base of my thumb. No redness across the knuckles. No reason for them to ache.
But somewhere beyond the cabin, fingers I hadn’t controlled in years had curled into a fist because I’d heard Avena and she’d said she was there.
“Avena!” I gasped out her name.
Normal, if I ignored the pressure drilling into the base of my skull.
A voice passed through the floor.
“—supports resealed.”
Another answered, too distorted to separate the words.
One.
Two.
Three.
The cabin shuddered before I reached six.
“Linked-source transport,” someone said.
The words arrived from everywhere and nowhere. They were not loud. They had the distant, flattened quality of a radio station just beyond range.
“Central Integration.”
I knew enough Khevari by now to translate both phrases without help.
They were moving me.
My body lay at its center.
The image vanished so fast I couldn’t tell whether the man under the glass had opened his eyes.
I grabbed the doorframe. Pain answered from somewhere deeper than my hand. Pressure tightened around my chest. Air moved into lungs I couldn’t feel and came back out before I decided to breathe.
I had imagined waking a hundred different ways since Avena told me where I was. I had never imagined watching it happen from the wrong side of my own eyes.
Another lock engaged.
“Steward authority suspended.”
I stopped breathing in the cabin. My other lungs kept going.
“Residential command access revoked.”
Something struck metal beyond the walls. A low voice ordered someone to hold still.
Then Avena’s voice cut through the distortion.
“His name is Declan Shaw.”
The cabin lights flared white.
I had known she would tell them. She had carried my instructions out of the cabin because I asked her to. She had stood in that chamber and repeated every limit they had spent years pretending I could not set.
But knowing was different from hearing her say it and hearing what it cost her.
Her title was gone. Her control of the house was gone. Whatever protection came with the silver bracelet was gone.
Because she had told them I was a man with a name.
My jaw locked before anything else caught up. Anger was easier than the other emotions that were trying to overwhelm me.
I didn’t want her in their hands, but I didn’t want to be alone with them.
Both things were true. Neither one made the other decent.
The one that had closed.
My fingers here tightened around worn wood. I followed the ache past my knuckles, into my wrist, up an arm that felt miles away. The connection started to slip but I caught it again and pushed everything I had toward my smallest finger.
Nothing happened.
“Come on.” I gritted my teeth, as sweat beaded between my shoulder blades.
I tried again, not with the whole hand this time. One finger. One joint. One stupid piece of a body that belonged to me whether I could reach it or not.
The table flickered beneath my palm.
Somewhere in the white room, a voice said, “Peripheral movement.”
My smallest finger burned.
I laughed once. It came out closer to a gasp.
“You’re mine, goddammit.”
The room shifted.
Avena stood inside the open doorway.
She wasn’t solid. The blue-gray clothes she wore in the cabin broke apart every few seconds, replaced by a pale sleeping tunic open at the throat.
Her silver-white hair hung loose around her shoulders.
A dark bracelet circled one wrist. Beside it, a narrow band of white light tightened against her skin.
She looked at me as if she had been searching through walls.
“Declan.”
I crossed the room before I decided whether I should. She lifted one hand, then stopped with it between us. Even now, she left the last inches to me.
I didn’t take them. Not yet.
“What did you tell them?”
Her image broke into a column of white light and returned. “Your name.”
“I heard that part.”
“Then you heard the most important part.”
There was no pride in her voice. No request for me to understand what she had given up. She stated it like a simple fact that belonged in a record.
The cabin wall flashed transparent. For an instant, a pale-uniformed figure stood where Grandpa’s bookcase belonged. His hands adjusted something near Avena’s shoulder. She flinched and became solid again.
“They’re taking you to Central Integration,” I said.
“They are taking us both.”
The pressure in my chest changed. A strap tightened across a body I couldn’t move.
“You were supposed to stop them from taking me apart. You weren’t supposed to climb into the box with me.”
Blue-white light moved beneath her throat. Her lips twitched up. “I did not climb into it.”
“No. You just stood in front of my glass tomb until they arrested you. Completely different.”
“They did not use the term arrest.”
“Of course they didn’t.”
“The transfer was proceeding,” she said. “The second support collar produced a concurrent response. They wanted to classify the event as contamination and separate our neural patterns.”
“So you told them.”
“Everything necessary to make separation an alteration of evidence.”
“But that put you under their jurisdiction.”
“Yes.”
One clean answer. No apology wrapped around it. No explanation designed to make me comfort her.
I walked away because wanting to pull her against me had nothing to do with whether I trusted what happened next. I stopped at the fireplace and stared into flames that couldn’t warm the body being strapped into a machine.
“Does Selari know?”
“She witnessed the declaration.”
“Did she try to stop you?”
Avena went still. “She gave me a way to describe the event as an attachment identification rather than independent participation.”
“A way out then.”
“A narrower consequence.”
“That’s Khevari for a way out.”
“Yes.”
I turned. “And you didn’t take it.”
“No.”
The anger was still there, but it had changed direction. It focused in on the people who had made telling the truth a crime worthy of imprisonment.
Avena had known what they might take from her. Her title. Her home. Her freedom. She had told them anyway.
It didn’t undo what had happened between us. She hadn’t asked it to.
Evidence, she had called her actions. Not promises. Choices.
This one choice—the choice to save me—had made her a prisoner.
“You knew what this might cost,” I said.
Her lilac eyes held mine. “Yes.”
“And you did it anyway.”
“Yes.”
No defense. No request that I forgive her. Just the truth, and the knowledge that she had chosen it even when the choice put her here.
Beside me.
The force of what that made me feel for her scared the hell out of me.
Avena’s gaze suddenly shifted toward the doorway. A sound moved through it—boots, a command, the soft mechanical whine of something powering up.
“I could not let them take you alone,” she said.
There it was. The real truth of what she’d done. I crossed back to her and stopped where her raised hand waited between us. I took it.
“You should have let them take me. They shouldn’t get both of us, Avena. It’s not right.”
Gold flashed at the base of her fingers. Her lips parted but before she could answer, the cabin pitched hard to the left and Avena vanished.
The transport had started.
“Avena!” I screamed into the void.
Her name echoed back thin and distant.
“Declan.” Her voice returned to me weak and distant.
I couldn’t see her. I held on to the table and tried to follow her voice through the pressure flooding my skull.
“If this happens again,” I said, “if either of us can hear the other, use my name.”
“As a return signal?”
“No.” The cabin floor rippled under my boots. “We don’t know what that means yet. This is just so they can’t say we’re one neural pathway, one malfunction, with two bodies.”
The quiet went on long enough for fear to get its hands around my throat. Was she gone already? Did she hear me?
Then she said, “Declan Shaw.”
“Avena Serath.”
The names steadied the room. Not much but enough to steady my breathing. Then a new voice broke through, lower and roughened by age.
“—separation is not removal from the fight.”
“Vaeron?” I shouted.
No answer came to me. Avena must have heard more. Blue-white light flickered near the doorway without forming her body.
“They are taking him elsewhere,” she said.
“Can he stop this?”
“Not now.”
“Can he follow?”
“He intends to try.”
I almost told her intentions didn’t mean shit at this point but decided that wouldn’t be helpful. Vaeron had surely already taught her that intention wasn’t evidence. She had just provided enough evidence to get herself locked into a transport with me anyway.
“Tell him to be careful.”
“He would consider that inefficient advice.”
“Tell him anyway,” I insisted.
“I will.”
The lake appeared beyond a pair of sealed transport doors. Then all of it collapsed into darkness.
The suppression felt familiar and that scared me more than the pain.
Avena was somewhere near the cradle. Awake. Restrained. Wearing a dead silver bracelet and a band that marked her as part of the equipment being moved.
I had seen her real face once when our two worlds lay on top of each other. That wasn’t enough.
I left the table and walked toward the place where the front door had been. Each step took more effort than the last. The cabin pulled at me, offering the chair, the fire, the coffee that never cooled. Safety built from memory. Oblivion dressed like home. I refused.
“Declan.”
Her voice came from far away. I followed it past the door.
The hand gave me a thread. I followed it into my wrist, my arm, my shoulder. The pressure across my chest returned. Air was pushed into my lungs. Something hard supported the back of my head.
Light burned red through my eyelids.
Fuck! Open, damn you.
Nothing happened.
I pushed again. The effort tore through the base of my skull and sent white sparks across the dark.
Open!
My eyelids separated by less than an inch.
The world was blurred, white, and painfully bright. A curved transparent wall distorted everything beyond it. Pale figures moved near the edges. Black supports crossed the ceiling.
Then silver-white hair entered the narrow strip of vision.
Avena sat inside the transport frame beyond the cradle, held upright by a white restraint crossing her body. Her sleeping tunic was still open at the throat. The silver bracelet on her wrist reflected the clinical light without producing any of its own. Beside it, the monitoring band glowed.
Her face was not the flawless construction of a dream.
It was tired. Frightened. And very real.
Her head turned.
Lilac eyes found mine through the glass.
Shock emptied her expression. Then blue-white light flooded beneath her skin so brightly that even my failing vision could see it.
“Declan.”
My mouth wouldn’t move. My lungs belonged to the machine. I couldn’t give my voice back to her.
But I held her eyes until the darkness pulled mine closed again.
This time, I was the one who disappeared.