Chapter 5
FIVE
The data didn’t lie.
Evie sat cross-legged on her bed with the tablet propped against her knees, scrolling through Jarran’s neural readings from that afternoon’s session.
She’d been staring at the same graphs for twenty minutes.
She didn’t need twenty minutes. She’d known what the spike meant the second it appeared on her screen, sitting in the dirt beside him with her fingers on his temple and his whole body going rigid.
Limbic system activation. Autonomic nervous system surge. Elevated heart rate, increased blood flow to the extremities, pupil dilation, involuntary motor response. Textbook arousal. Every marker, clear as day, firing in perfect sequence the moment her skin touched his.
She’d pretended she didn’t recognize it. She’d said “cold hands” and pulled away and moved on, because that was the professional thing to do. The correct thing. The thing a doctor should do when her brain-damaged patient has a physiological response to physical contact.
Except she hadn’t been professional at all. She’d been a coward. She’d seen the readings and felt her own face flush and known, in that horrible, clear moment, that the flush wasn’t embarrassment. It was response. Her body had answered his before her brain had a chance to intervene.
And then he’d touched her wrist.
Evie put the tablet down and pressed her palms over her eyes.
She could still feel it. His fingertips against the back of her wrist, light and careful, barely there.
He’d reached for her because she was flustered and he wanted to help.
That was all. He didn’t have the context for anything else.
His shattered mind saw a person in distress and tried to fix it with a gentle touch, and her stupid pulse had kicked up, and her foolish breath had caught.
She’d found herself staring into his dark green eyes, and all appropriate thoughts switched to inappropriate ones.
Fuck.
She was his doctor. He was her patient. He couldn’t consent to a conversation about the weather, let alone whatever her limbic system was suggesting.
The power imbalance alone was enough to make her stomach turn.
He depended on her. He trusted her. He saved fruit for her and said her name carefully, pulling each syllable off a limited shelf, and she was sitting here with her heart going sideways because he’d put his fingers on her wrist.
She closed the neural data file. She didn’t need to look at it again. She needed to walk into that bay tomorrow, do her job, and keep her hands steady and her face neutral and her stupid, inconvenient feelings locked in a box where they couldn’t compromise her patient’s care.
She slept badly. Chaotic dreams—yes, some of them steamy and involving Jarran—kept waking her up.
It was too hot. Then, it was too cold. Finally she got annoyed and gave up on sleep altogether.
She watched vids by some guy who grew space fungi on some remote space station until it was technically time to get up.
The bay doors opened the next morning and the warm, humid air hit her face. She walked down the central aisle with her shoulders tight and her professional mask firmly in place, prepared for awkwardness, for tension, for some residual strangeness hanging in the air between them.
Jarran looked up from his plants. He stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, “Morning.”
Fruit was waiting for her on the edge of the planting bed. Two pieces, deep purple, carefully selected. He’d set aside the grain clusters, too, arranged in a neat row beside her usual spot.
He was the same as every other morning. Steady, quiet, present. Either he’d moved past it or he genuinely didn’t understand what had happened in his own body yesterday. She suspected the latter, and the thought made her chest ache. Best not to examine that too much.
She was the one carrying the weight of what had happened.
He felt something and didn’t know what it was.
She felt something and knew exactly what it was, and she needed to stop feeling it immediately.
Or quit. And oh, what a resignation letter that would be: I’m submitting my resignation because I’m aroused by my amnesiac patient who is also an intergalactic criminal.
Yup. That’d be a career ender, right there.
“Morning.” She set her bag down and sat in the dirt beside the planting bed. Normal. Everything normal. “How are we today?”
“Good.” He settled cross-legged across from her. “New growth on the back row. Three plants.”
“Your experiments are working, then.”
He nodded. The almost-smile pulled at his mouth. “Supervisor is impressed.”
“You’re going to put yourself out of a job. They’ll promote you to running this whole bay.”
He considered that. “Would be okay. Like it here.” He glanced around the bay, then back at her. “Like it more when you come.”
Her heart rate increased but she ignored it and covered it up with a too-bright smile. “Well, you’re stuck with me. Coalition contract, remember? You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”
“Not trying.” He held her gaze.
She busied herself pulling the scanner from her bag. “Right. Okay. Ready?”
They fell into the routine. She ran the standard cognitive exercises, showed him image sequences, noted his responses.
His neural patterns were consistent with the previous sessions.
Procedural memory intact, emotional memory active and unresolvable, conscious recall fragmented.
She kept her voice even and her notes thorough and didn’t think about his eyes or the fact that her pulse would not settle to its normal rate.
But she was doing fine. She was being professional. This was fine.
An hour in, she shivered. The bay was warm, but she’d been sitting still on the ground for a long time, and the damp soil had leached the heat from her legs. She absently rubbed her arms and kept talking, running through the next set of images, ignoring the chill.
Jarran stopped responding to the exercise. He reached behind him and pulled out a folded blanket. Coarse, gray thermal fabric. Standard Baylan issue. He opened it up, leaned forward, and draped it over her shoulders.
Carefully. Both hands, adjusting the edges so it sat evenly, just as he did when handling seedlings. Then he sat back and looked at the scanner screen, waiting for the next image.
Evie stared at him. “Where did this come from?”
“My quarters.”
“You brought a blanket from your quarters?”
He nodded. “You were cold yesterday. Noticed you rubbing…” He mimed her actions with his hands. “Brought it this morning.”
She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.
It was warm and smelled clean, like the soap from the ship’s laundry, but underneath that, it was a hard to describe, but impossibly sexy scent, of soil and plants and him.
His kindness wasn’t making this easier. That he’d noticed she was cold yesterday and brought a blanket from his quarters in case she needed it showed high-level awareness.
That he’d planned ahead because he wanted her to be comfortable meant Jarran Bando possessed empathy and concern for others.
It also meant he was more intelligent than it would seem considering he could barely assemble a full sentence and didn’t remember his own name. He couldn’t connect the image of his home planet to a single conscious memory, yet he’d spent his morning making sure she wouldn’t be cold.
Something cracked inside her chest. A fissure in the clinical wall she’d built between herself and every patient she’d ever worked with. Except this male.
“Thank you.” Her voice came out rough. She cleared her throat. “That was really thoughtful.”
“You are welcome.” He looked at her briefly, then back at the scanner. “Next image?”
She finished the session. She took the fruit he offered, and forgot to return the blanket to him, so she found herself standing on the lift with it.
It would be strange to bring it back now, so she held the blanket against her chest and stared at the numbers above the doors.
She breathed through her nose until the tightness in her throat eased.
In her quarters, she folded the blanket and set it on the desk beside the purple fruit. Then she sat on the bed and thought about what she knew and what she didn’t know, and the gaping chasm between the two.
She knew the file. She’d memorized every crime, every date, every documented atrocity. She knew what Pella Rin had done and what he’d built and how many lives he’d destroyed. That was real. That was fact.
But she was starting to know Jarran, too. The version that existed now, with his broken sentences and his gentle demeanor. And those two people didn’t fit inside the same skin.
She needed more information. Not from the file.
Not from the Baylan research notes. She needed to know who Jarran Bando had been before he became Pella Rin.
Whether the gentleness she was seeing was new, grown from the wreckage of his mind, or whether it had been there all along, buried under the things he’d done.
There was one person in the galaxy who might be able to tell her that. And he was going to hate hearing from her.
She spent an hour composing a carefully worded request, routing it through official channels to Virila.
Specifically, to Tagja City’s Queen Jessa, who was human.
She’d been chosen for the match program, with had paired Virilian males with compatible human women to help the Virilian species survive after illness decimated their female population.
The matches were meant to produce children and nothing more, but many of the human-Virilian parings turned out to be love matches, as well.
Jessa had been paired with King Virak and the match had been more than successful.
According to the entertainment vids, they had several children and ran some kind of animal sanctuary in Tagja City.
Of course, Evie didn’t watch the tabloid vids.
Or at least, she didn’t admit to watching them.
But in this case, her gossip fascination had taught her that Jessa would be the easiest point of contact and the most efficient person to deliver a message to a certain Virilian pilot based in Tagja City named Taron Bando. He was Jarran’s brother.
He probably wouldn’t talk to her, but she had to try.
Evie identified herself, her credentials, her assignment.
She asked whether the Bando family had any history of neurological conditions.
She asked whether there were childhood memories, specific experiences that might help her run associative exercises for a patient with severe memory loss.
She did not use the name Pella Rin. She referred to him only as Jarran Bando, Patient Nine, currently under Baylan medical custody.
She sent the message and didn’t expect a fast response. Tagja City was several systems away, and Coalition channels weren’t exactly built for speed.
The response came eighteen hours later. Not from Queen Jessa. From Taron Bando himself, in a recorded message.
Evie opened it at her desk with a cup of the terrible Baylan coffee going cold beside her.
Taron Bando looked nothing like Jarran. He was slightly shorter, leaner, sharper-featured, and had a harder edge to his expression.
But the green of his eyes was the same, just a few shades lighter, and there was something in the set of his jaw that she recognized.
He was sitting in a private room, stone walls behind him, his posture rigid.
“Dr. Carr.” His voice was flat. “I received your inquiry through Queen Jessa. She thought I should respond, so I am responding. Once.” He paused. The muscles in his jaw worked.
“My brother died sometime during his abduction by raiders when he was in his teens. Whatever is on that ship is not Jarran. Jarran was long gone before the terti incident that caused his current state. The male you’re treating is what’s left of Pella Rin, and Pella Rin is everything they say he is.
I know this, because for a time, I joined him in that…
life, if you could call it that. During that time, I saw no trace of the brother I knew.
So, to answer your question: No, there are no neurological conditions in my family that I know of.
I cannot talk about childhood memories and I am not interested in helping you put him back together so he can stand trial or be studied or anything else people want with him. ”
Another pause. Longer. His gaze dropped to his hands, which were clasped tight in front of him. “Don’t contact me again about this.”
The recording ended.
Evie watched it a second time. She could see how painful it was for Taron to talk about his brother.
The anger was loud and obvious. But underneath it, there was pain.
Old, deep, calcified pain. Taron Bando had lost his brother twice.
Once to the raiders who abducted him and once to the terti incident.
The anger and resentment were real, but they were born out of grief, and there was no grief unless there was love underneath it all. So.
She closed the recording and sat back in her chair. The coffee was cold. She drank it anyway.
She would not contact Taron again. He’d been clear, and she’d respect that. But she filed away what she’d seen in his face, because it told her something the file couldn’t.
Jarran Bando had been loved. Before the Sifters got their hooks into him, there had been a brother who idolized him enough to follow him into a criminal organization, and who hated him enough now to call him dead.
That kind of hatred came from having watched someone you love do things you couldn’t forgive.
She wouldn’t tell Jarran about the message.
There was nothing to be gained from telling a male with no memories that the brother he might eventually remember didn’t want to be remembered.
But she thought about the image of the laughing boy on the screen that had made Jarran press his fist to his chest and say, “I know him here.” She’d pulled it from a generic database.
A random Virilian child. It had no confirmed connection to Jarran’s past. Except the emotional response hadn’t been random.
Somewhere behind the walls in Jarran’s mind, Jarran knew he had a brother.
Evie picked up the blanket from her desk. It still carried the faint, clean scent of him.
She was in trouble. She knew that now. Clinical distance was a wall she’d been standing behind for sixteen cycles, and Jarran Bando had put a crack in it.
She couldn’t unknow the things she was learning about him.
She couldn’t unfeel what she’d felt when he touched her wrist. And she couldn’t reconcile the male who loved plants with the monster in the file, no matter how many times she read it.
She was Jarran Bando’s doctor. That was her job. That was the boundary.
But the boundary was cracking, and she wasn’t sure how to keep it from crumbling.