Chapter 3
THREE
Wake up. Do morning routine of exercise, shower, getting dressed.
Drink the Baylan equivalent of coffee, which tasted like hot water filtered through cardboard, but woke her up fast. Review her notes from the previous session.
Walk to the lift. Ride it down to the agricultural bay.
Try not to contemplate the fact that she spent her days running brain scans on a male who used to run a criminal empire.
The bay doors opened, and the air shifted. Warm, humid, alive. She breathed it in and felt her shoulders relax. She’d started to understand why Patient Nine preferred it down here. Everything else on this ship was engineered within an inch of its life. This place actually grew.
“Good morning,” she said in Universal.
“Morning.” He wiped his hands and stood up.
The full height of him still caught her off guard sometimes.
She was five foot six, which was average on Earth and basically pocket-sized out here.
He towered over her, broad and solid, dirt on his knees and under his fingernails, his black hair pushed back from his face.
His dark green eyes tracked her as she set her equipment bag on the edge of the planting bed.
“How are the plants today?”
He considered this. “Good. This one.” He touched the plant he’d been tending. “Growing fast.”
“Faster than expected?”
He nodded, and there was that almost-smile again.
Quiet pride. He grew things and they thrived, and that mattered to him.
She pulled her scanner from the bag. It was a handheld Baylan device, sleek and pale, about the size of a tablet.
When activated, it projected a thin field that could map neural activity in real time without physical contact.
“Ready to work?” She held it up.
He eyed the scanner. He didn’t like it. She knew that. But he sat down on the edge of the planting bed and angled his body toward her, which was his version of consent. A cycle ago, he’d flinched every time she raised the device. Now he just went still and waited.
“I’m going to show you some images,” she said, pulling up the assessment sequence on the screen. “Just like yesterday. Just look at each one and tell me if anything comes to mind. A feeling, a word, anything. There are no wrong answers.”
“No wrong answers,” he repeated. He said that back to her every time, and she’d started to suspect he found it funny.
She held up the first image. A Virilian transport vessel, standard class, silver hull.
He looked at it. “Ship.”
“Anything else? A memory, a feeling?”
He studied it for a moment longer. “No.”
She noted the neural response on her scanner. Minimal activity. Recognition only, surface level. She swiped to the next image. A curved Virilian blade, ornate handle, the kind used in formal combat.
His hands moved. Both of them, simultaneously, fingers adjusting grip on something that wasn’t there.
His right hand rotated at the wrist and his left dropped lower, and for a split second he was holding an invisible weapon with practiced ease.
His neural map lit up. Motor memory, procedural recall, deep skill pathways blazing with activity.
He blinked. Looked down at his hands. The grip released.
“What just happened?” Evie kept her voice steady.
“I don’t know.” He turned his hands over, staring at his palms. “My hands knew it.”
“The blade?”
“Yes.” He flexed his fingers. “Don’t remember using one. But hands do.”
She noted the response. Procedural memory intact, conscious access severed. His body held information his mind couldn’t retrieve. She swiped again.
An orange desert sky, vast and open, two pale suns low on the horizon.
Virilia. His home planet. She didn’t expect a response at all, but his breathing changed.
His chest expanded, held, and released slowly.
The scanner showed a cascade of activity across his temporal and limbic regions.
Emotion, deep and layered. The readings were consistent with those of people experiencing longing and grief.
It was a fundamental response, rooted deep.
“What do you feel?”
He was quiet for a long time. His jaw worked, and she could see him reaching for words. “I want to go there,” he said finally. “I don’t know where it is.”
“That’s okay.” She meant it. “You’re making progress.”
“What…is that planet?”
Evie paused, debating how to respond. This was the first time he’d asked a question, and brushing him off didn’t seem like a good idea.
On the other hand, answering his questions was not part of the protocol she was supposed to be following.
“It’s an image of the planet Virilia,” she replied.
It was the truth. His question was answered, minus his association to the planet. He hadn’t asked that, after all.
He looked at her. Really looked, and held it.
His dark green eyes were steady and open, and for a second, she forgot about the file and the crime sheet and the list of atrocities and just saw the male in front of her.
Tall, careful, trying so hard to pull language out of a broken brain.
He had such an expressive face when he was thinking about things, and it went with good bone structure.
Photographers would have loved him on Earth.
The smudged eyeliner-like marks around his eyes gave him a dramatic, almost artistic look, and the black hair falling past his jaw softened the angles of his face.
If she wasn’t his doctor, Evie would have noticed him as a male first, and that thought needed to go directly in the disposal bin where it belonged.
She cleared her throat and swiped to the next image.
A child laughing. A still frame from a video file of a young Virilian boy, maybe four or five, mouth wide open, eyes crinkled. She’d pulled it from a generic database. It had no connection to his specific past, as far as she knew.
His whole body reacted. His shoulders drew up. His hands closed into fists on his thighs. The scanner went haywire. Deep emotional response, unresolvable. Every pathway firing, none of them connecting to conscious memory. His eyes went bright and wet, and he turned his head away from her.
“We can stop,” she said.
“No.” His voice was rough. He wiped his face with the back of one dirt-streaked hand. “I’m fine.”
He wasn’t fine. But she respected the lie and gave him a minute. She powered down the scanner and took some notes, giving him space to pull himself together without an audience. When she looked up, he was watching her again.
“The boy,” he said. “I know him.”
Her pulse kicked. “You recognize him?”
He frowned. The frustration on his face was painful to watch. “No. I don’t recognize him. But I know. Here.” He pressed his fist against his sternum. “I know him here.”
She made a careful note. Emotional memory without cognitive access. The connection was there. It was just locked behind a wall his conscious mind couldn’t climb.
That was the pattern she’d been mapping all cycle.
The terti powder hadn’t destroyed his memories.
They were still in there, every single one, firing when the right stimulus hit.
His brain recognized things his conscious mind couldn’t access.
The damage was in the bridges between the two.
Millions of neural connections, severed.
Her job was to rebuild them, one painstaking link at a time, and hope that what came back was the male and not the monster.
It was delicate work. Slow. And there was no guarantee it would work at all.
“Same time tomorrow?” she asked, packing up her equipment.
He nodded. Then he reached over to the planting bed beside him and picked up a piece of fruit. Round, deep purple, about the size of a plum. He held it out to her.
“For you,” he said. “I grew this.”
“For me?” She took it, and her fingers brushed his. It was not easy to ignore the sharpening of awareness that tingled her nerve endings and kicked her heart rate up a notch. The fruit was warm from the grow lights and heavier than it looked. “Thank you.”
He went back to his plants. She stood there for a second, holding a piece of alien fruit that an amnesiac galactic war criminal had grown for her in a hydroponic bay, and thought, Get yourself the fuck together, Carr.
She tucked the fruit in her bag and departed, taking the lift up three levels to the research wing.
The corridors here were narrower and busier, lined with laboratories and analysis stations.
Baylan researchers moved between them in their pale uniforms, data tablets in hand, conversations murmured in their own language.
Evie’s Universal was decent, but Baylan was a different beast entirely.
She caught fragments and let the rest wash past.
Director Silca’s office was at the end of the main corridor. The door was open. Evie had never looked forward to reporting to the heads of wherever she was working, especially when she couldn’t deliver the answers they wanted. She knocked on the frame to announce her presence.
Silca looked up from behind a curved desk covered in data displays.
“Dr. Carr.” She was tall, even for a Baylan female, with bronze metallic hair pulled back from a face that was striking and utterly unreadable.
Her skin had the same faint luminescence all Baylans shared, and her eyes were a cool, deep gray that gave nothing away.
She wore the senior researcher’s variant of the standard uniform, slightly darker, with a thin band of metal at her cuffs that Evie knew denoted her high rank.
“I’m scheduled to deliver you a report on Patient Nine,” Evie said, stepping in.
Silca gestured to the chair across from her. Evie sat. The chair was precisely the wrong height for a human, leaving her feet dangling an inch off the floor. She ignored it.