Chapter 3
Three
Kira
The chill that coursed down Kira’s back acted as a siren.
She lunged forward. “Get back!”
For the first time ever, Jin froze. His panic beat at Kira through their bond. She could feel the way his mind blanked.
Suddenly her vision doubled to include Jin’s perspective. Dual scenes played out before her eyes.
Peering up at Caius in horror. Charging forward with everything she had. A knife appearing in Caius’s hand. Plunging downward.
Then some force threw Kira out of Jin’s head. She crashed back into her own body. Still in the process of lunging forward.
Time slowed, moving like honey.
“Jin!” Kira screamed.
She felt a surge from Jin. A tug went down their bond. There was a sucking sensation as her reserve of ki abruptly spilled into him. Kira did nothing to resist the pull, letting him take as much as he wanted.
Suddenly, the air was filled with his mini-mes. Dozens of figures in all shapes and sizes. All orbiting in a protective halo around Jin.
They blocked the blow meant for him.
Caius’s brow furrowed in confusion. His hesitation made him slow and unable to defend as half of the mini-mes around Jin broke off to dart at his face. They sliced his skin to ribbons. Blood poured down his forehead, cheeks and chin to splash against the cobalt blue of his armor.
Then Kira was there.
She snagged Jin by the waist and threw them both backwards, turning in midair to protect Jin from the assailant. Even as, in the next second, Finn and Raider barreled into Caius from the side.
Kira and Jin hit the ground.
Finn and Raider shifted between her and Jin and Caius. Immovable walls as Kira dragged Jin to safety.
Isla appeared behind Caius a second later, her expression murderous as she lifted her sword. Caius’s head went flying. His body toppled.
“Holy shit.” Raider stared down at the former commander of House Roake with wild eyes. “I mean what the actual fuck?”
“Where have you been?” Sariah demanded with an accusing frown at Isla. “How did you let them get so close?”
Good question. Kira was interested in the answer herself.
Isla looked a little angry as she glanced down at Kira. “I think I know why those oshota you encountered were so combative.”
Kira followed her glance through the doorway to where Isla’s partner was in the process of wiping his en-blade free of blood, several bodies—three of them, in fact—at his feet.
“They’re impersonators. Their armor is fake,” Isla declared, her jaw flexing.
Not having time to process that statement, Kira rolled off a far too still Jin. She tugged him onto his back and started patting his face. “Jin? Wake up, Jin!”
When he failed to answer, her pats got harder and harder.
Jin started convulsing.
Forgetting about Isla, Caius and the emperor’s oshota, Kira flipped him onto his side and cushioned his head.
“What’s wrong with him?” Raider asked, crouching next to them.
Kira fought to keep her voice even as she tried to keep Jin from hurting himself. “He’s having a seizure.”
“Can you stop it?”
“If I could stop it, don’t you think I would have already tried?” Kira snarled in a momentary loss of control.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Kira forced herself to swallow her anger, knowing that Raider wasn’t really the person she was mad at.
That would be herself. This was her fault.
No one else’s. When the oshota they encountered tried to stop them, she should have said to hell with the emperor’s rules and insisted they continue the hunt.
Not led that person directly back to Jin.
Stupid, Kira. She’d known something was wrong and ignored it.
How could she judge the Tuann for their arrogance and then be guilty of the very same mistake?
Sariah drew a blade that was the length of Kira’s forearm and pointed it at her face. “Step away from the child.”
Kira flicked the inquisitor an irritated look, wondering what Sariah thought she was going to do with that toothpick.
More decorative than anything, the dagger had pretty swirls etched along its length and a lovely silvery shine. It was also obvious that Sariah had very little idea on how to properly wield it. Otherwise, she never would have held it the way she was.
“We don’t have time for this,” Kira said.
Sariah placed the tip of the blade against Kira’s neck, pressing just hard enough to draw a bead of blood. “Heir of Roake, I will see you pay for this attempt on the life of the emperor’s son.”
Raider gave the woman an incredulous look. “Did you not just see Kira pull his ass out of danger? He’d have a new hole in his body if not for her.”
Dylan squatted on the other side of Jin, forcing Sariah to move her blade or risk cutting him.
She chose the former.
The grizzled oshota set a hand on Jin’s chest, his touch far gentler than Kira would have expected. “How is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Jin’s convulsions had eased, but he was still unconscious.
“What are you doing, Dylan?” Sariah protested. “We need to take her and the others into custody. It’s your duty as the emperor’s oshota.”
“Not very bright, is she?” Kira observed.
It was easier to focus on Sariah than on the fact that Jin wasn’t waking up.
“She’s new and thinks she has something to prove.”
“A deadly combination,” Kira noted.
Dylan’s expression remained neutral, showing neither agreement nor disagreement.
“Put that away, child,” Jin’s maybe mom ordered as she rose from the table and glided over to them.
“Lady Amaris—” Sariah objected.
Jin’s maybe mom shut Sariah up with a look. “I will not ask again.”
Reluctantly, Sariah withdrew her blade and sheathed it.
Amaris’s gaze dropped to her son.
Kira didn’t know how to describe the emotions playing over the other woman’s features. There was concern, definitely. Distress and a mother’s heartache that made Kira’s own emotions fluctuate before she clamped down on them.
Amaris’s gaze lifted abruptly to snare Kira’s. “You’re the only one who can help him.”
“How?”
“Your bond. Use it to show him his way back.”
Kira lifted her gaze to scan the room, finding Jin’s mini-mes scattered everywhere.
Some had fallen to the floor when Jin had, like puppets whose strings had been severed.
Others were frozen in mid air, their anti-gravs keeping them afloat.
Then there were the ones that clung to the walls or hung upside down from the ceiling.
Now she saw what Amaris meant.
In his panic, Jin had defaulted to his old way of handling things. He’d reached for his mini-mes and they’d become his arms and legs. Only he was no longer the drone. Spreading his consciousness into so many pieces had put an incredible strain on his mind.
It retaliated with a seizure.
Kira dropped her gaze to study her friend’s still expression. “Just how long have you been able to do this?”
If he’d bothered consulting her, she would have warned him of the dangers that came with sharing or splitting his mind. The loss of self was disorienting, requiring practice and a fine-tuned control.
Jin had neither. Especially when afraid and in danger.
Gods, she hoped he hadn’t given himself permanent brain damage.
Forcing her concern away, Kira closed her eyes, concentrating on that spot in the back of her mind where the piece that she associated with Jin resided.
A massive electrical storm, its violence and breadth giving her pause, roiled where he should have been.
You idiot, Jin.
Kira plunged herself into that storm. Electricity bowed her spine.
Every muscle in her body clenched. Her bones threatened to break under the force. Her jaw clamped shut, her molars groaning with how hard she was biting down. A high pitched, pained sound whistled between her teeth as Kira struggled to navigate the dozens of branches her mind tried to travel down.
Vaguely, she caught Raider’s angry rumble and Finn’s concern.
It was disorienting trying to follow the paths that Jin had taken.
Pure, unrelenting madness. So many things competed for dominance. The sheer influx of information and stimuli causing microscopic brain bleeds.
If not for Kira’s familiarity with mind melding with Jin’s drone self, she would have been lost right then and there.
As it was, she could only just cope while sharing some of the stress Jin’s mind was under.
Her body started to shake and tremble. Colored lights fired across her vision. A part of her suddenly ended up in something else. Many something else’s. The mini-mes. Kira got several bird-eye and worm-eye views of her body slumped over Jin’s. A seizure jerking the limbs of both of them.
Raider grabbed her, lowering her onto her back. He held her head steady as Dylan did the same for Jin.
“What is wrong with her?” Raider asked.
His voice came at Kira from a dozen different directions.
“She’s sharing his burden,” Amaris explained.
Raider’s face held frustration and exasperation as he looked up at Jin’s maybe mom. “Lady, tell me something that’s actually useful.”
The oshota next to her frowned.
Amaris waved him away as she focused on Raider. “You are worried.”
“Ya think?”
Kira would have winced at Raider’s tone if she’d still been in her body and not spread out over dozens of machines.
“You needn’t be. They will both be okay,” Amaris said with a certainty that was strange.
Kira didn’t have time to delve into why that was as she turned her attention back to the task at hand.
She gathered the pieces of Jin that he’d scattered across his mini-mes, dragging them along their shared connection before stuffing them all back into the body that acted as his current container and anchoring them in place.
In the process, she thought she understood what had gone wrong.
With how new Jin’s connection to his body was, he hadn’t had time to fully settle into his flesh. That was why his soul had gotten so easily lost. It had come loose from its mooring.
This would happen again. And keep happening until Jin found a way to bond with his body. To fully accept and embrace what he now was all the way down to his soul.