Chapter 6
KAELION
“Kae…Kaelion, please…”
Her voice repeats in my head the whole way back to my apartment, the two of us sitting in silence beside each other on the train from the university. Lyn’s voice…Lyn on the floor of the lab, writhing and warm and wanting. Lyn, compromised by her own genius.
Lyn…who I never saw like that until tonight.
And now?
Now I can’t stop.
“I can really go home,” she says from beside me, her knee bopping up and down incessantly. “I promise I won’t go back to the lab.”
“We both know the risk is too great,” I say.
She sighs, tilting her head back against the train window. “The risk of me inventing the world’s first accidental orgasmatron?”
I don't respond. I’m not amused. I’m not supposed to be amused.
In reality, I’m counting off symptoms in my head—delayed seizure response, synaptic misfire, memory corruption, potential degradation of cortical tissue.
The translator doesn’t just read signals.
It writes back. If she left it on even a second too long, it could’ve begun overwriting other pain-processing pathways entirely.
“You may have burned out part of your anterior cingulate cortex,” I say, watching the city lights flicker past. “Or your insula. Possibly both.”
“You’re catastrophizing,” she replies. “If there were real damage to the insula, I’d be having sensory disassociation. If it hit the cingulate, I’d be in full-on emotional dysregulation or catatonia, not cracking jokes about my vibrator hat.”
I glare at her. “As your supervisor, it’s my job to catastrophize. I probably should have been doing more of that before you volunteered yourself as a test subject.”
“I promise it wasn’t all that bad,” she says, a smile ghosting over her lips.
I don’t return the look.
She sobers fast.
“Look…at least we know it isn’t as broken as we originally thought—it’s just translating wrong, like if you wanted to get Skoll out of Merati and instead you got…I don’t know, Portuguese? But they’re all languages—”
“Translators killed too, before the technology was refined,” I tell her. “Biotech isn’t a toy, Walker. It can cause permanent brain damage.”
And you have a beautiful mind, I almost add but think better of it.
She falls silent, her knee still bouncing, but slower now—like the weight of what I said is finally starting to press down. I don’t like scaring her. But I’d rather see her humbled than hurt.
The train jerks slightly as it pulls into my district. She glances up at the station marker and then back at me.
“So,” she says, “what happens if I did start to rewire something? What would it feel like?”
I hesitate. “You might notice pleasure from things that used to hurt. Or…pain from things that didn’t used to hurt.
Your threshold could change. You might start misclassifying inputs—heat, pressure, even emotional responses.
Worst case, your reward system could start treating pain stimuli as positive reinforcement.
That kind of loop is…difficult to undo.”
She exhales slowly. “But I’m not showing signs of any of that yet.”
“Not yet,” I say. “But neural misfiring doesn’t always show immediately. We’re not dealing with a bruise or a sprain. We’re talking about live software in an organic processor. And yours is overclocked even on a normal day.”
That earns me a sideways look. “Was that a compliment?”
“A warning,” I mutter, standing as the doors slide open. “Come on.”
She follows, not saying anything more until we’re out on the street and walking the short distance to my building.
The night air is crisp—rare for this late in the season—but she doesn’t shiver.
Just keeps pace with me, a little too close, like she’s trying to read me sideways while pretending not to.
“I’m not sorry,” she says finally, as we near my steps. “About trying it. I wouldn’t have gotten this far without pushing the edge.”
I pause, hand on the codeplate for the door. “I’m not asking you to be sorry.”
The door opens before she can ask more questions, then we’re moving into the elevator. It carries us upward, Lyn looking around.
“This…seems nice,” she says. “Big faculty salary, huh?”
“The Nyeri’i Authority pays for my housing,” I murmur.
“So you’re kind of a big deal.”
I glance at her sidelong. “Not at all. I worked in Systems Containment before I began my career—it’s dangerous, so my people pay for our education and housing.”
“Systems Containment?”
“First responders,” I explain. “We go into ships on the verge of catastrophic collapse, save as many people as possible. Before the Trinity was destroyed, we were the ones who got people off our homeworlds.”
“That’s actually really cool,” she says quietly.
I grunt. “Thank you.”
The elevator lets us out on my floor, and I scan my keycard at my door. When it slides open, Flicker rushes out with a disgruntled yowl—
—and Lyn practically leaps out of her skin.
“What the fuck is that?” she breathes.
I look from her to my pet. “She is an draken,” I explain. “Harmless. Her name is Flicker.”
“Flicker,” Lyn repeats, then looks down at her.
Flicker stares back.
“Sorry, she…I thought it was a bigass snake,” Lyn says. “Snakes scare me.”
“They don’t seem that frightening.”
Her eyebrows go up. “You ever seen Anaconda?”
I just peer at her.
“Of course you’ve never seen Anaconda,” she mutters.
I gesture toward the door. “Come in,” I say. “She won’t bother you; she just wants to smell you, then she’ll probably sit on the back of the couch and observe.”
Lyn still looks nervous. “So she’s not friendly?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I say, “but she is selective.”
Lyn swallows hard, but then she steps through the door. I follow her in, make sure Flicker has joined us, then I shut the door behind us.
And then…she’s in my apartment.
The first female who has ever been here besides Shahar or my daughter.
Lyn looks around, and it strikes me suddenly that she is deeply, bizarrely out of place here. My lab is just as tidy as my home, but her station is always chaotic; here, she seems strange in the enforced order.
“Sit,” I instruct her, gesturing toward the couch. “Vitals first. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“I could use a beer and a cigarette.”
I narrow my eyes at her.
“Water would be great,” she says with a sheepish grin.
I go to the kitchen to get her a bulb of water, and I come back to give it to her. She takes the bulb with a confused look, brow furrowed.
“What is this?” she asks.
I look over my shoulder to her, now at the cabinet to get my medical kit.
“It’s…water.”
“I know,” she says. “But—how do I drink it?”
“Ah,” I say. “Here, it’s—you just press your lips to it and suck. It’s a biodegradable membrane designed for 0G, low waste—”
“Just press my lips to it and suck, huh?”
I stiffen. “Your lack of inhibitions is getting me a little concerned.”
“Calm down,” she mutters. “I’m just embarrassed and compensating by being a smartass.”
I return with the med kit.
“Stay still,” I order.
She goes entirely still right away, and I pull out a bioscanner to check her vitals. Everything is within range—heartrate, neural activity, blood oxygen. No elevated temperature…no signs of neural degradation.
Her pulse is a little high, but I assume that’s from the nerves, the comedown…
…the coming.
“You’re not looking at me like I’m dying,” she says after a moment.
“Because you’re not.”
“So this is just your default face?”
I frown. “This is my face when I’m trying to care for a disobedient scholar who’s been nothing but ungrateful.”
“Wow,” she says. “But—fair, I guess.”
“You guess?”
Lyn blinks. “I mean…yeah.”
I snap the scanner shut, returning it to its proper place in my kit before shutting the lid. I go back to the cabinet, trying to hold it together long enough that I can calm down.
It doesn’t work.
“Lyn,” I say, turning around, “you did something that shouldn’t be forgivable tonight.
You broke…every safety rule. You disobeyed a direct order intended to stop you from hurting yourself or somebody else.
You failed to pass a review for live trials, so you chose to perform a live trial on yourself, alone.
Do you understand how reckless that was? ”
She’s quiet.
That in and of itself scares me.
“Lyn,” I repeat. “Are you—”
“I understand,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Advisory boards exist for a reason,” I go on. “There is a reason we follow safety protocols.”
“You mean like…so we don’t end up orgasming non-stop on the floor?” she says.
I shake my head. “This isn’t a joke—”
“I’m aware,” she says. “Kae—Dr. Rhyss—if you hadn’t been there tonight, I don’t know if I would have been able to stop it. I could…I know I’m making jokes, but I could still be there. I have no idea what happens to the body or the brain when it’s put through that level of arousal for that long.”
I cross my arms, staring hard at her, trying to tell if she’s serious. Her shoulders sag, and she stares down at the water bulb.
“You could have induced status epilepticus,” I say. “Or cardiac arrhythmia. Or a dopamine cascade severe enough to cause long-term anhedonia afterward.”
She winces.
“So don’t do it again.”
She nods. “I won’t.”
I don’t believe her.
Not really.
“You won’t,” I repeat, stepping closer. “Because next time I find out you’ve touched that interface without clearance, I won’t walk you home. I’ll write the suspension notice myself.”
She finally looks up. “Dr. Rhyss—”
“I’m not doing this because I want to control you. I’m doing this because you clearly can’t control yourself.”
The words come out…different than I intended. She flinches.
And then, slowly, something strange flickers across her face. Her lips part. Her breath catches.
“Okay,” she says, almost breathlessly. “Got it.”
I narrow my eyes. “You’re smiling.”
“No, I’m not,” she says way too quickly, already turning away as she tucks her legs up on the couch. “I just…you’re being very assertive. It’s weird. I think you’re scaring me into good behavior.”
My eyes dart over her face like I can stare through her skull and figure out what the hell is wrong with her. But…I’ve already scanned her for injury.
She’s just had a long night.
I can do another scan in the morning, before…
“Gods,” I breathe. “I nearly forgot—I have to be somewhere in the morning. You should get some sleep.”
She looks around. “Okay. I’ll take the couch—”
“You can sleep in my daughter’s room,” I interrupt. “The bed is made. There’s no reason for you to sleep out here when there’s an empty bed.”
Lyn looks genuinely shocked. “You…you’re a dad?”
“Yes,” I say.
She blinks at me. “Like…recently? Is she a baby?”
“No. She’s eleven. She’s lives in the Arborium with her mother and she spends her summers with me.” I pause, then add, “Shahar and I were never bonded, but we parent together. It’s amicable.”
“That’s…” She tilts her head. “That’s really nice, actually.”
I grunt and start walking toward the hallway. “Room is the second on the left. Clean linens, spare sleepwear in the drawer. Call out if you need anything.”
“Okay,” she says, rising slowly. “Thanks.”
I stop in the doorway, one hand on the frame. “Don’t thank me yet. I expect you to follow every instruction I give tomorrow. You’re under observation, and until I’m sure you’re not a danger to yourself—or anyone else—that lab is off-limits.”
“I understand,” she says softly. “I’ll be good.”
“And leave the door open,” I add. “I need to check on you to make sure you don’t lose consciousness.”
“Yes, sir.”
I glance over my shoulder at her.
She’s already halfway down the hall, trailing one hand along the wall, her hair in those wild corkscrew curls, her body language…soft. Pliable. Sleepy, maybe, but not just that.
There’s a kind of weightlessness to her. Like someone waiting to be told what to do next.
And that’s the part that worries me.
Because something…something is different.
I’m just not sure what yet.