Jarran's Forbidden Memories

Chapter 1

ONE

It hung in orbit around a pale gray moon in Baylan-controlled space, gleaming and sterile and coldly beautiful.

Pretty much everything the Baylans built looked like this.

They had a very specific aesthetic, which Evie suspected was all about function.

The transport shuttle docked with barely a sound.

The airlock cycled. And then Evie Carr, Doctor of Neurology and Psychology, with two master’s degrees thrown in for good measure, was standing on the most advanced medical research vessel in three quadrants with a bag over her shoulder and a classified file she’d dissected on the transport over.

A Baylan liaison met her at the airlock. He was tall, slim, and his bronze hair had a metallic gleam that characterized his people. His name was something with a lot of consonants that she immediately forgot.

“Dr. Carr. Welcome aboard. I trust your transit was satisfactory?”

“It was fine, thank you.” It had been twelve hours in a metal tube with recycled air and a protein bar that tasted like cardboard mixed with regret, but sure.

Satisfactory. She was too nervous to deal with these pleasantries.

Her employer, the Earth-Interspecies Medical Coalition, was paying her an eye-popping sum to come here.

To study one single patient. To say the pressure was high was an understatement.

He led her through corridors that looked like they’d been scrubbed down to the molecular level.

The lighting was cool and even. Panels of information scrolled along the walls in Baylan script she couldn’t read, and the few researchers they passed wore matching pale uniforms and expressions of intense, focused neutrality.

Everything about this place whispered controlled environment.

Even the air felt regulated—temperature, humidity, probably emotional output if the Baylans could figure out how to manage that.

“Your patient is in the agricultural bay on the lower decks,” the liaison said as they stepped into a lift. “He is most stable there. We have found that his agitation levels remain low when he is working with the plants.”

“His agitation levels,” Evie repeated. As though they were discussing a piece of equipment with a temperamental operating system.

“Patient Nine responds poorly to clinical settings. We attempted standard cognitive rehabilitation in the medical wing during his first cycle here. The results were”—the liaison paused—“counterproductive.”

She could imagine. “What happened?”

“He broke a scanning table. It was bolted to the floor.” The liaison said this in the same tone one might use to describe a minor scheduling conflict. “We adjusted our approach.”

The lift opened onto a long, wide corridor.

The lighting shifted from clinical blue-white to something warmer and more amber.

They passed through a set of heavy double doors and the air changed, turning softer, damper, and carrying the earthy smell of growing things.

Evie took a deep breath of the humid air and forced her shoulders down. Fuck, she was tense.

The hydroponic agricultural bay was enormous.

It stretched the length of what had to be two full decks, with rows upon rows of vegetables, orchards, and other crops growing under banks of artificial light.

The plants grew in long rows of dark soil—real soil, she noticed, not the synthetic growing medium she’d expected.

Irrigation lines ran overhead in a precise grid, misting at intervals.

A handful of patients were scattered throughout the bay, each working alone, separated by wide distances.

Gardening as therapy, perhaps. The Baylans, it seemed, understood that some things couldn’t be fixed with a scanner and a sterile room.

Her heart rate picked up as the liaison led her down a central aisle between the crop rows. She was thinking about Patient Nine’s file again. Had been thinking about it since she first opened it on the transport, and every time, her stomach made the same unpleasant flop of dread.

Patient Nine. Real name: Jarran Bando. But the larger galaxy that followed criminal intelligence reports knew him as Pella Rin.

The name alone had nearly made her decline the assignment. But the Coalition didn’t exactly hand out high-level assignments like party favors. Turning this one down would put her at the back of the line for the next three years. So here she was.

Pella Rin had been the leader of the Sifters, a sprawling criminal organization that operated across multiple quadrants.

They trafficked in everything from illegal drugs to weapons to people.

The terti flower trade, which produced a mind-altering powder that was as addictive as it was destructive, ran through their supply chains.

But it was the bioengineering that had made Pella Rin infamous.

His operation had created hybrid females, engineered from multiple species’ DNA—including human—who could handle and process the terti flower without becoming addicted.

Living beings, manufactured and sold. The file had used clinical language to describe it, but that didn’t make it less horrifying.

Most recently, he’d murdered a Sislus warlord and shot a fellow Virilian named Niir in the chest during a confrontation on the Sintra-1 space station. He was wanted across four quadrants and considered dead in at least two of them.

And now Evie was supposed to help him get his memories back.

The irony of that was not lost on her. Most of her colleagues back on Earth were treating post-concussion syndrome in retired athletes.

She was treating a galactic war criminal whose mind had been blown out by a massive dose of terti powder during that same confrontation on Sintra-1.

One of the bioengineered females he’d created—a woman named Calinae—had triggered a device that released a cloud of the powder at close range.

It had been an act of desperate self-preservation, and it had worked.

The terti did what no weapon, no fleet, and no prison had been able to do: it took down Pella Rin.

And it turned him into Patient Nine. Also, somewhere in there might be a Virilian named Jarran Bando, but Evie didn’t know.

The Baylans had offered to take custody of Pella Rin, and Trak Letu, Virilian prince of Exir City, had agreed to release the prisoner into Baylan hands rather than execute him, reportedly at the Baylan Saar-king’s request. The Baylans had, in the file’s careful phrasing, “an intriguing use for him.” What that use was, exactly, the file didn’t say, but the Baylans weren’t a species known for cruelty and torture.

Perhaps they needed an agricultural worker.

More likely, they wanted one of the worst criminals of his time watched like a hawk in arguably the most securely fortified base ship in the quadrant.

What the file did say was this: the high level of terti exposure had caused catastrophic neurological damage.

The majority of his long-term memory was gone.

His language centers were impaired. He communicated in broken phrases of the quadrant’s universal trade language and little else.

Cognitive function was fragmented. Personality markers from his criminal profile—the calculating intelligence, the charisma, the cold strategic mind—were absent.

What remained, according to two cycles of Baylan observation notes, was a large, docile, cooperative male who liked growing vegetables and flinched when people approached him from behind.

Evie had treated brain injuries before. Traumatic cases, stroke patients, degenerative conditions.

She knew what neurological damage looked like from the inside—the confusion, the gaps, the frustrating awareness that something was missing even when the patient couldn’t name what.

But she’d never treated someone whose missing memories included an entire criminal career.

She wasn’t sure there was a protocol for that.

If there was, it probably hadn’t been written with the assumption that the patient could remember how to kill people before he remembered his own name.

The liaison stopped walking. “There.”

Evie looked where he pointed, and there was her patient.

He was kneeling in the soil at the end of a long row of leafy crops, both hands buried to the wrists in dark earth.

Even kneeling, he was imposing. Evie estimated that standing, he was close to seven feet, with the powerful build that all Virilian males seemed to share.

His black hair hung past his jaw, unkempt and slightly damp from the humidity of the bay.

Tattoo-like marks covered his forearms and disappeared under the sleeves of the simple gray work clothes he wore.

His blue tail lay still in the dirt behind him, the sharp barb at its tip half buried.

If he noticed them, he didn’t care. His gaze remained on the soil he worked.

Evie swallowed. Her mouth had gone dry somewhere between the transport and this row of blue alien lettuce.

“I’ll leave you here,” the liaison said.

“Your quarters are on deck four. I’ll send the location to your personal device.

” He paused. “A reminder, Dr. Carr: the patient’s neurological status is monitored and he has an implant that can interrupt violent behaviors.

If you feel unsafe at any point, security is always ready to intervene. ”

“Thank you.” Evie didn’t look at the liaison. She was watching Patient Nine gently separate the roots of a seedling with fingers that could clearly crush bone.

The liaison’s footsteps retreated down the aisle, and then it was just Evie, several thousand square feet of vegetables, and the most dangerous criminal in recent galactic history.

Great. Totally fine. She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder and reminded herself that she had voluntarily accepted this assignment. In hindsight, that may have been a spectacular lapse in judgment.

She took a breath and walked toward him.

He looked up when she was about ten feet away.

The movement was slow and unhurried. She knew then that he’d been well aware of her and the Baylan male’s presence this entire time.

She got her first clear look at his face and felt a jolt. He was unsettlingly handsome.

All Virilians were attractive—it was one of those things humans had gotten used to grudgingly, like the existence of faster-than-light travel and decent alien coffee—but this was different.

High, angular cheekbones, a strong jaw, a mouth that in another life probably curved into a devastating smile.

Dark green eyes watched her from behind the inky skin that all Virilians had smudged around their eyes, like permanent eyeliner applied on an emo rock star.

Those eyes were calm and utterly empty of everything his file said he should be.

To her surprise, the trepidation she’d felt up until this moment evaporated. What she felt instead was something worse. She felt sad.

“Hello,” she said in Universal. She’d spent the last three months learning it, and her accent was terrible, but it worked. “My name is Evie. I’m a doctor. I’ll be working with you.”

He watched her with mild curiosity, like someone who didn’t get many visitors and didn’t care either way.

Soil clung to his hands. A smear of it darkened one cheek.

Then he slowly rose to his feet, unfolding to his full height.

She craned her neck and she was reminded, viscerally, of exactly how large Virilian males were.

“Doc-tor,” he repeated. His voice was deep, a little rough, and the word came out careful and deliberate, as though he was selecting it from a limited shelf. He glanced down at his dirty hands, then back at her, and wiped them on his pants. “Hello.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” She wasn’t sure if that was true, but it seemed like the thing to say. “I see you have skill with plants.”

He looked at her for another beat, as if parsing the sentence. Then he turned and gazed at the row he’d been working on—a sweep of broad-leafed plants in deep, healthy blue. His expression shifted and he nodded.

“Good soil.” He touched one of the leaves, turning it gently to show her the underside. “This kind…” He paused, searching for the word, and made a climbing motion with his hand. “Needs help.” He pointed to a thin stake he’d planted beside it.

“You trained them to grow up the stake?”

He nodded, once.

“They look wonderful,” she said, and she meant it. The plants looked healthier than anything she’d ever managed to keep alive, which, granted, was a low bar. Her last houseplant had died of what she suspected was boredom.

He didn’t respond to the compliment. He crouched back down, returned his hands to the soil, and continued working. Just like that, the conversation was over. She’d been gently dismissed by a male who had no clue he used to command a criminal empire.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said. “If that’s all right?”

He looked up briefly, nodded again, and went back to his seedlings. She could have been anyone. A doctor, a janitor, a hallucination. He likely would have nodded the same way.

Evie turned and walked back down the aisle. She didn’t rush. Her feet sank into the soft soil, but she kept her steps even and her breathing steady. She was a professional, damn it, and professionals did not speed-walk away from their patients. At the double doors, she stopped and looked back.

From this distance, he was just a large figure working in the soil, his dark head bent over a young plant he was carefully tending. Patient and focused and gentle.

But then there was his file, and it was a doozy.

His list of crimes was eye-watering. If you could get through the body count, there was engineered women, and an empire of suffering supposedly built by the same hands currently coaxing plants to grow.

It was hard to reconcile the horrors in the file to the male who’d wiped his dirty hands on his pants before saying hello, like a kid caught playing in the mud.

The file said he was a monster. The Virilian male in the dirt didn’t say much of anything.

Evie didn’t go to her quarters. She took the lift up two levels to a long balcony that overlooked the agricultural bay. The promenade ran the full perimeter, designed for observation. She leaned on the railing and looked down.

There he was, far below. Still working. The most wanted alien in four quadrants, gently planting seedlings.

She shivered at the possible ramification of her assignment and wondered if, ethically, there was any benefit to reuniting this patient with his memories. It was entirely likely they were gone forever, but if they weren’t, would she be restoring wholeness to a person, or resurrecting a monster?