Chapter 4
FOUR
He’d started saving the best fruit for her.
Jarran didn’t think about it too carefully.
Thinking about things too carefully led to places where the dark shapes lived, and he’d learned to stay out of those places.
But every morning when he tended the plants in his assigned section, he found himself sorting the harvest with more attention than the task required.
The ripest fruit was set aside, along with the grain clusters that broke apart clean and smelled faintly sweet.
He’d set them on the edge of the planting bed where Evie always put her bag.
He didn’t know why her smile mattered so much. But it did. When he gave her the fruit he’d chosen for her, her face changed. The serious line of her mouth softened and her light brown eyes warmed, and the dull ache in his chest went quiet. Just for a moment. Enough to breathe a little easier.
Sixteen cycles had passed since her arrival.
Maybe more. Time on the Korath-7 moved in a steady, unmarked current, one cycle bleeding into the next.
But Jarran had started marking his days by her visits.
Before Evie, the cycles had been the same.
Wake. Eat. Plant. Sleep. With occasional unpleasant tests in there that kept him always hyperaware of who approached him.
Now there was Evie. She talked to him and waited for answers and brought a clean, warm scent into the humid air of the bay.
He found himself listening for her footsteps before she arrived. The bay doors would hiss open, and he would know by the sound of the footfalls whether it was Evie or his guards, or someone else. Evie’s steps were quicker. Lighter. They had a rhythm he’d memorized without trying.
Today he heard them and looked up. She came down the central aisle with her equipment bag over one shoulder, her brown hair pulled back from her face.
She was wearing the same plain clothes the Baylans wore, pale gray, but on her they looked different.
She smiled when she saw him, and he felt the ache ease.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning.” He stood, wiping his hands. “Good harvest today.”
“Yeah?” She set her bag on the planting bed and looked at the row he’d been working. “These look healthy.”
“Strong roots.” He touched one of the broad leaves. “Deep in the soil.”
“That’s the secret, huh? Good roots?”
He nodded as they both sat down. It was the secret to most things, he thought, though he couldn’t have explained that in words. Some knowledge lived in his body and came out through his hands, not his mouth.
He handed her a grain cluster as she arranged her legs cross-ways. She never complained about sitting on the dirt. He liked that about her. She popped a grain into her mouth and chewed. “Oh, these are good. Are these the ones from the back row?”
“Yes. More light there. Sweeter.”
“You can tell the difference by where they grow?”
He nodded as he adjusted himself to mirror her cross-legged sitting pose. “Position matters. Light, water, neighbors.” He gestured to the row of broad-leafed plants beside them. “These shaded the grain. Had to move them.”
“You rearranged the crops?”
“Baylan agricultural supervisor said I could...” He paused, searching for the word. “Experiment.”
She grinned. “Patient Nine, agricultural innovator.”
He almost smiled at that. Almost. The muscles in his face wanted to do it, but his face had forgotten the movement. The corners of his mouth pulled, and then stopped, and Evie’s grin faded. She looked at him a beat too long, then reached into her bag.
“I have something new today,” she said, pulling out a device.
It was smaller than the scanner she usually used, flat and round, about the size of her palm.
A thin wire connected it to her tablet. “This is a neural contact sensor. It reads brain activity through direct skin contact. More detailed than the scanner.”
He eyed it. “On my head?”
“On your temple. Right here.” She touched the side of her own head, just above the ear. “I’ll attach it, run a few exercises, and take it off. It won’t hurt. I promise.”
He studied the device. There was a lot of interest in his brain, from a lot of people on this ship.
The Baylan researchers ran their scans and studied their data and spoke about him while he sat right there.
Evie was different. She explained things.
She asked before she touched him. She treated the inside of his head like it belonged to him, not to the research program.
“Will it tell you something new?” he asked.
“I hope so. The scanner reads broad patterns, but this reads specific neural pathways. It might help me understand which connections are damaged and which ones are just…dormant. Sleeping.”
“Sleeping,” he repeated. He understood sleeping things. Seeds slept in the soil before they grew. Maybe his memories were like seeds.
“Exactly.” She held up the sensor. “May I?”
He angled toward her.
She shifted up to her knees to get closer. Close enough that he could smell her. Clean skin and something faintly sweet that he’d started associating specifically with her. She raised the sensor and reached for his temple.
Her fingertips were cool against the side of his head, just above his ear, and the contact sent a jolt through his body that had nothing to do with the device.
Heat flooded through him, sudden and disorienting, starting at the point of contact and spreading down his neck, across his shoulders, into his chest. His hands, which had been resting on his thighs, closed into fists.
His breathing locked. His tail, which had been lying still on the planting bed behind him, twitched hard, the barbed tip snapping sideways.
He didn’t understand what was happening.
His body was reacting to something his mind couldn’t identify.
The heat was intense, pooling low in his abdomen, tightening muscles he didn’t have names for.
His heart hammered against his ribs. He sat perfectly still because moving felt dangerous, because his body wanted to do something and he didn’t know what.
“Sorry,” Evie said. She pressed the sensor into place and pulled her hand back. “Cold hands. I should have warned you.”
He said nothing. He couldn’t. His teeth ground and his pulse thundered, and if he opened his mouth, he wasn’t sure what would come out. He stared straight ahead at the row of plants in front of him and focused on breathing.
She settled back down, tablet in hand, and stopped. Her eyes went to the screen, then to him, then back to the screen. Her brows drew together.
“That’s…huh.” She tapped something on the tablet. Tapped again. A flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks, pink against her freckles. She cleared her throat. “Your readings are, um. Elevated.”
“Sorry.” The word came out before he knew why he was saying it.
He just saw the color in her face and the tension in her posture and wanted to fix it.
He reached out and touched her hand. Gently.
Just his fingertips against the back of her wrist, the way he’d touch a seedling he didn’t want to damage.
She went still. Her eyes came up to his and held.
The flush deepened. Her lips parted, just barely, and he heard her breath catch.
For a long, stretched moment, they looked at each other, and Jarran was aware of her with a completeness that was new and overwhelming.
The freckles on her nose. The pulse beating in her throat.
The warmth of her skin under his fingertips.
The tightness in his groin that felt familiar and urgent and entirely beyond his comprehension.
She pulled her hand back. “Let’s, um.” She looked at her tablet. “Let’s run the exercises.”
The rest of the session was different. She kept her distance.
Her voice was steady but her movements were stiff, and she didn’t meet his eyes the way she usually did.
When she showed him images on the screen, she held the device at arm’s length instead of sitting beside him.
When she asked him questions, she wrote his answers without the follow-up comments she usually made.
No “that’s interesting” or “good, tell me more.” Just the question, the note, and the next image.
He berated himself for…whatever he did to cause her upset. Was it the touch? His reaction to her touch? He didn’t know. He had not harmed her. Had not touched her in a place that females found inappropriate, and yes, he somehow knew what those places were.
He wanted to say something to bring back the ease between them, the quiet warmth of their routine.
But the words were too complicated and too far down, and by the time he’d assembled even the beginning of a sentence, she was efficiently peeling the sensor off his temple and packing up her equipment.
“Same time tomorrow,” she said. It wasn’t a question this time.
He reached for the fruit he’d set aside for her. The best of today’s harvest, deep purple and heavy in his palm. He held it out.
She looked at it and a line formed between her eyebrows. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and left without taking it.
He stood in the bay holding the fruit and watching the lift doors close behind her. The ache in his chest, which her smile usually eased, pressed harder. He set the fruit back on the planting bed and returned to his rows.
The rest of the shift passed slowly. He planted. He watered. He checked root systems and adjusted stakes and did all the things his hands knew how to do. But his mind kept returning to the moment her fingers touched his temple. The heat. The tightness. The look on her face when their eyes locked.
Left and Right came for him at the usual time. He finished his row, stood, wiped his hands, and nodded. They walked. The corridor was quiet. The lights were bright, and he squinted as his eyes adjusted.
“Good shift?” Right asked.
“Good shift,” Jarran said. The words were easy. The lie was small.
Left glanced at him. “You’re quiet today.”
He was quiet every day. But Left was observant, and maybe today’s quiet had a different quality to it.
Jarran didn’t have the words to explain what had happened in the bay.
He didn’t have the words for any of it. A female had touched his head and his body had caught fire and she’d left without taking the fruit he grew for her, and now the corridor felt too bright and too long.
“Tired,” he said.
Left nodded and didn’t push. Baylans understood the value of leaving things alone.
In his quarters, he ate his meal standing up. Protein cubes, grain mash, sliced vegetables. He chewed without tasting. He showered, changed, and lay on his bed in the dark. His tail curled around his ankle. The ceiling was invisible in the dark above him, but he stared at it anyway.
He thought about her hands. They were small compared to his.
Precise. She held the tablet and the scanner with a steady competence.
When she talked, she gestured with her left hand, making different movements to punctuate her words.
When she’d touched his temple, her fingertips had been cool and firm and careful.
Careful. That was the word for her. She was careful with him.
She moved slowly around him, spoke clearly, gave him time to find his words.
She was the only person on this ship who treated him like his responses mattered.
The guards were decent. The researchers were…
mostly decent. But Evie was careful, and the difference between decent and careful was enormous.
He wanted her to come back tomorrow, and for the first time, he was worried she wouldn’t. He wanted her to take the fruit. He wanted her to smile at him and say “no wrong answers” and make that small, bright sound she made when the grain clusters were sweet.
He wanted her to touch his temple again, even though the last time had short-circuited something inside him that he still couldn’t name.
The wanting confused him. He didn’t want the researchers to touch him.
He didn’t want the guards to touch him. He wanted Evie to touch him, and he wanted it with a certainty that felt older and deeper than his broken memory.
As if his body yearned for something his mind had lost the context for.
He pressed his palms flat against the mattress and stared at the dark ceiling.
A memory surfaced. Sudden, unprompted, rising from the dark.
A female hand gently brushed hair from his forehead.
He was lying down. He was small. A child.
The hand moved slowly, pushing dark hair away from his eyes.
There was warmth around him. Safety. Love.
A female voice that was familiar and forgotten murmured something he couldn’t hear clearly, and the hand smoothed his hair again and again.
Then it was gone.
He lay in the dark with his fists pressed against his sternum and his eyes wet.
The ache was enormous. It filled his chest and his throat and pressed behind his eyes.
He knew that hand. He knew it the way he’d known the laughing boy on Evie’s screen.
Deep, wordless, locked behind walls he couldn’t climb.
He didn’t know whose hand it was. A mother’s, maybe. Probably. He didn’t know if he’d had one. Everyone had one, at some point. He strained his thoughts to try and remember her, but he could only pull up gentle touch on his forehead, and the safety of being small and cared for.
Evie’s hands were careful. That mother’s hand had been gentle.
He didn’t know if the two things were connected, but they lived in the same place in his chest, side by side.
It had been an impossibly long time since he’d been touched gently.
Surely that was why he’d had such a strong reaction to Evie.
He closed his eyes. Tomorrow she would come back. She said she would—twice. She would bring her scanner and her tablet and her steady voice. She might smile. She might not. Either way, she would be there, and that was enough.
It had to be enough.