Chapter 22
Xylo
The bandages were sorted by width.
Xylo knew this because he had sorted them himself.
Twice. The first time near dusk, when the light through the villa’s narrow windows had turned the supply room amber and he’d told himself he was simply being thorough.
The second time an hour later, when thorough was no longer a sufficient lie and he’d needed something—anything—to keep his hands from going still.
Now, past midnight, he was doing it a third time.
He worked with the same methodical calm he brought to every procedure: roll, assess, align, stack.
The coagulant strips went beside the plasma-burn compresses.
The bone-knit splints nested in their case by size.
He moved through the inventory the way he moved through triage—systematic, efficient, each item in its place—and tried not to think about Zirene.
Tried. Failed.
Zirene was at the front.
Xylo could feel Selena through their bond—the faint gold thread of her winding through him like a second pulse.
Alive. Present. Distant. The bond gave him what was familiar: the steady hum of her consciousness, the low strain she carried like breath, the constant pressure of a Beacon holding too many minds at once.
But Zirene…
There was nothing for Xylo to catch.
No binding connection threaded Zirene into the clan’s web.
No shared shieldline. No telltale flicker of pain, no sudden silence that would ripple through them all and make every spine go rigid at once.
If Zirene took a wound, if he fell, Selena wouldn’t know in that instant—not the way the rest of them would know if one of the clanbrothers went down.
There would be no internal alarm, no reflexive surge of mine snapping tight around her ribs.
Only absence afterward. Only news delivered too late.
It sat wrong in Xylo’s chest, heavy and helpless. Zirene had chosen distance—duty demanded it, his pride demanded it, the war demanded it—but the cost of that choice was brutal in its simplicity.
Selena could feel the clan.
She could not feel her Shadow.
And Xylo hated that the universe had left that gap open, as if daring fate to slip a blade through it.
He thought about the months she had been gone before.
Not at the front—captured. The months of void before they’d learned she was alive, before the bond had reasserted itself across the distance and proved she was still there, still breathing, still Zirene.
The damage she’d carried back from that absence—wounds he could treat, and ones he couldn’t.
She had rebuilt. Slowly, with her particular ferocious stubbornness, she had rebuilt.
But the memory of those months lived in Xylo in the specific way trauma lodged in healers: not as grief but as a catalog of what he had been unable to fix.
He didn’t want new entries in that catalog.
He couldn’t heal what he couldn’t reach.
Xylo set down a roll of compression wrap. Picked it up. Set it down again.
V’dim and Z’fir would leave in two days.
The same morning as Selena—the clan fracturing all at once, in all directions, departures stacked on top of each other until what remained here would be himself and Odelm and three cubs and the particular silence of a villa built for their clan’s full constellation.
Not for the front—not the grinding meat of open war—but to take up position within the system.
Destima’s orbit. Its perimeter. Necessary work, work only two commanders with their particular bond-sense and tactical history could execute.
He understood that. Had understood it when the plan was laid out, had nodded at the planning table in the way he nodded when understanding and acceptance were not the same thing.
Necessary work that put distance between them and any healing hands.
If Z’fir caught a hull breach. If V’dim’s shields took a hit—the kind that left burns along the edges of psychic exposure, the kind Xylo had treated once before and had hoped never to see again.
If either of them needed him in the dark window between injury and response, when minutes were the margin between stabilized and not—
He would be here. With his supplies. Sorted by size.
The thought pressed against the inside of his ribs like a bruise he kept finding in the dark.
He reached for the next crate.
“You know,” said a voice from the doorway, “Kaede at least has the decency to pace. You’re just reorganizing the same shelf.”
He turned.
Selena stood in the entrance to the medical wing, shoulder braced against the frame, arms loose at her sides.
She wore sleep clothes—soft lavender, slightly rumpled at the hem—and her silver hair was unbound, falling past her jaw in the way it did when she’d already undone it for bed and then couldn’t stay there.
Her golden bond threaded through his awareness the way it always did, warm and constant, but what he registered now was the quality of her attention.
Not anxious. Not urgent. She had come to him the way she came to all of them—with intention.
His chest did something complicated.
“I’m organizing,” he said.
“For the third time today.” She crossed the threshold, bare feet quiet on the medical wing’s cool floor. “I felt you through the bond. You’ve been in here since the twins left for bed.”
He tracked her progress toward him the way he tracked a patient’s vital signs—involuntarily, precisely, unable to stop. She stopped beside the supply counter and reached out, taking the compression wrap from his hands with a gentleness that made his grip loosen before he’d decided to let go.
“How many have you gathered?” he asked, because deflection was a reflex he was still working on suppressing.
“Two.” A small smile—the kind that acknowledged what they were both doing, her collecting strays, him resisting collection.
“V’dim was first. He was staring at the night sky outside.
” She set the wrap on the counter. “Z’fir I found in the greenhouse.
He was tending the vines at midnight as though they needed him to hold them up.
” Her gaze moved over the rows of sorted supplies, the crates, the cases aligned with near-surgical precision. “You’re the last.”
He had known he would be.
“You should rest,” he said.
“Everyone says that.” She turned back to him, and there was something in her eyes that was not impatience—she had never been impatient with him—but the particular knowing of a nestqueen who had been studying her mates long enough to read them from the inside.
Something she could’ve done easily if she wanted, connected to all her clanmates—other than her Shadow.
“Everyone also seems to think that saying it is enough.”
He didn’t have an answer for that.
“I want everyone in the nestbed,” she said.
Her voice settled into something quieter, stripped of the gentle irony.
“Before the days run out. Before we all scatter to our duties and our distances.” She paused, and the pause carried the weight of the coming days: one more full day together, and then Day 4 when the landing pad would empty all at once.
“I want one night where I can reach every one of you without crossing a void to do it.”
He should have moved toward the door. The rational course—healer, Primary, the mate who kept the shape of things—was to close the supply crates, turn off the light, follow her up the stairs. The supply room would survive the night without him. The bandages would remain sorted.
His hands stayed on the counter edge.
“You’re as bad as Kaede when it comes to working through the night,” she said.
Something fond in it, not reproach—the fondness of someone who had learned to love the frustrating parts too.
“At least most of the others know when it’s time to rest. He goes until he can’t, and then he finds something else to do.
” She crossed to him, closing the last of the distance between them.
“I have Z’fir in the nestbed, who will not sleep because he is too composed to admit he doesn’t want to.
I have Odelm, who has been performing fine since this morning.
The others are there as well… And then, I have you.
” Her hand rested against his sternum, over the teal thread of their bond. “Don’t make me beg you.”
Something absolute settled in him at that.
“You never have to beg me,” he said. “For anything. Not ever.”
Her expression shifted—something in the set of her jaw, a loosening he hadn’t known she’d been holding. She pressed her palm flat against his chest, and the warmth of it moved through him like the first indicator of a fever breaking.
“Then let’s go.”
“Wait.”
She stilled.
He didn’t know how to begin. That was the problem—not the feeling itself, but the finding of words for it.
Xylo had always been good at the parts of life you could measure.
The clinical. The physical. Give him a wound and he would close it; give him a fever and he would break it; give him a patient in crisis and he would work with steady hands until the numbers stabilized.
Research, too—he could lose himself in it for days, chasing patterns, building answers from fragments, caring for others in the quiet ways that didn’t require him to expose his own ribs.
And he’d always thought words were one of his strengths.
Not performance like Odelm—no poetry meant to make a room sigh—but honesty. Calm explanations. Confessions spoken without drama. He could say hard things when they needed saying. He could sit beside someone in the aftermath and name the pain so they didn’t have to carry it alone.
Until he’d met her.