Chapter 8
EIGHT
Everything was different.
Jarran worked on his plants in the agricultural bay, but his thoughts were somewhere else. The toramdo plants needed attention. The back row was overdue for its first harvest. But instead of attending to those matters, he was thinking about Evie.
The pulse racing under his touch. Her warmth against his fingers.
The way she’d shivered when he’d touched her.
That shiver had been a relentless pull on his mind since yesterday.
Every time he closed his eyes, he felt the soft skin of her inner wrist, the flutter of her heartbeat quickening under his fingertip.
He didn’t think she feared him, which meant she’d felt attraction, but the fact that he couldn’t be sure unsettled him almost as much as the memory of his brother’s face.
Taron. The name was permanently etched in his brain now.
He’d spent the night turning it over in his mind, and other recollections had come loose with it.
He remembered an underground house with stone walls.
A courtyard with pink-leafed trees and windows on the ceiling that let in soft light.
Taron had been younger, running ahead of him down a corridor, and talking nonstop.
The adoration in those green eyes when he’d looked up at Jarran had been impossible to miss.
He had more words for everything now, too.
Brother. Younger brother. My responsibility.
Language was returning in clusters, whole concepts arriving intact, and with them came the heft of understanding.
He’d been someone’s older brother. He’d been the one who was supposed to keep Taron safe, and he’d loved that boy more than he could explain, even to himself.
But other things had broken loose, too. Darker things. Things that woke him in his quarters with his sheets soaked and his hands shaking and a throbbing in his head so bad his skull ached.
The bay doors opened and he heard her footsteps. His entire body responded before his mind caught up. Shoulders dropping. Breath evening. His chest swelled as he looked toward the sound of her shoes on the floor.
She came down the row carrying her equipment bag.
He tracked every detail, from the set of her jaw to the tension in her shoulders.
She held her tablet against her chest instead of in the bag at her side.
She didn’t look quite right. He’d seen her tense before, but this was different.
Her smile when she reached him was a little too bright.
“Morning.” She sat and turned on her tablet. Quick, efficient movements.
“Morning.” He wiped his hands. “You okay?”
“Fine. Let’s get started.” She didn’t meet his eyes.
She was not fine. Her body language was closed off and her voice was higher than usual.
She was avoiding looking at him for more than quick glances.
He wanted to ask what was wrong, but her expression had an edge to it that kept him quiet.
She looked braced. Preparing for something. He’d give her the space to get there.
She set up the scanner and he settled across from her. Their knees were close, and he was aware of every centimeter now. The warmth of her body radiated across the gap between them and his skin prickled with it.
“Tell me about your night,” she said, activating the device. “Any dreams? Memories?”
He had a lot to tell her. The words were coming easier now.
He’d noticed it yesterday, during the breakdown, and again this morning when he’d spoken to the guard who brought his meal.
Full sentences. Pronouns. The right tenses, mostly.
His vocabulary was still limited, but the mechanics of language was rebuilding itself, and the relief of being able to say what he meant was enormous.
“The memories are getting worse,” he said. “Stronger. More detailed.”
She looked up from the tablet. “Tell me.”
He rubbed his palms on his thighs. “A room. Cold, dark. Stone floor, metal walls. I was locked in. Starving. I don’t know how long. Long enough that I begged to be let out.” He paused. His throat was tight. “I wept. I pounded on the door until my hands bled and I wept.”
Evie’s fingers stilled on the tablet.
“Then they took me out. Bright light. White room. A…laboratory.” He touched the back of his neck, where the implant sat.
“Similar to the ones they bring me to here, but different. There were small aliens. They…” He frowned and tried to explain what he himself wasn’t even sure of.
“They did things to my head. Instruments. Machines. It hurt. Headaches so bad I couldn’t see. ”
“Can you describe the aliens in more detail?”
“They had pale yellow skin and huge dark eyes. Short. Up to here.” He held a hand at his mid-abdomen. “Thin. Quick hands. They didn’t speak to me. They spoke to each other, but I didn’t understand the language.”
She was typing rapidly. “What else?”
“After the laboratory, there was a male. Large. Bigger than the yellow ones, almost my size. He wore a mask over his face. He gave orders and I…” Jarran’s hands curled into fists against his thighs.
“I obeyed. I couldn’t not obey. My body did what he said.
Walk. Stop. Sit. Hit. I wanted to stop, but my body kept moving. ”
He could hear his own breathing, too fast. The implant pulsed at the base of his skull, a warning nudge. He consciously slowed his breathing to calm himself through it.
“The worst part is the feeling behind the obedience. I wasn’t angry or scared.
I was...empty. Following orders with no feeling at all, and then afterward, when I was alone, the horror of what I’d done would hit me.
” He pressed his knuckles against his thigh.
“I don’t know if these things happened once or a hundred times.
The memories come without warning. I’ll be working or eating or lying in the dark and they hit me.
I’m shaking, sweating. Can’t speak when it’s happening.
The implant calms me down eventually, but it takes time. ”
Evie set the tablet on the ground. She was looking at him with an expression he hadn’t seen from her before. Focused, calculating, her brows drawn together. She was putting pieces together behind her eyes.
“Jarran, do you think these memories are from when you were abducted by the raiders?”
He shrugged. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“It sounds consistent with what Taron described. You were taken as a teenager. Held against your will, but no one knows what happened during your abduction,” she said.
“This laboratory you describe, and the procedures on your head that may have caused forced obedience. These are very likely memories of your captivity.”
“The things they did to my head.” He touched his skull. “Is that what took my memories? What broke my mind?”
She was quiet for a moment. Thinking hard.
He could almost see the gears turning. “I don’t know yet.
Terti is what caused your current amnesia.
That’s documented. But what you’re describing sounds like earlier neural interference.
Significant interference.” She picked up the tablet again and scrolled through something.
“There may be more to the puzzle of your past than anyone originally thought. The terti wiped your conscious memories, but if your neural pathways were already compromised by whatever was done to you in that laboratory, the terti may have interacted with preexisting damage.”
He wasn’t sure what any of that meant. “Meaning?”
“Meaning your brain may have been altered before you ever became Pella Rin. The raiders didn’t just abduct you. They may have changed you.”
Pella Rin. That was a name no one had said to him. And unless he was mistaken, Evie hadn’t meant to utter it so casually. She’d been thinking out loud and that name had slipped out.
Had he chosen to be terrible? Or had something been done to him that made the choice for him? He didn’t know and uncertainty sat cold and heavy in his gut.
“Who is Pella Rin?” he asked in almost a whisper, afraid to know the answer.
Evie winced. “I didn’t mean to say that name to you today.” She watched him. “But you should know it’s the name you went by for a while.”
“The way you said it…” He furrowed his brow. Words were harder just then, when his head wasn’t clear. “It was like he was me and also someone else.”
She’d pulled her lower lip between her teeth and her eyes were bright. The tension he’d noticed when she arrived hadn’t eased, but it had shifted. “That’s exactly what he was. You and someone else.”
He closed his eyes. “He was a bad person, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.” Her voice had a consoling softness to it. “Very bad.”
“I’m not bad.” He looked up and locked eyes with her. “The thought of hurting anyone is—” He cut off with a choked noise and a shake of his head. “Unthinkable.”
Her hand closed over his tense arm. “I know you’re not bad. Jarran Bando is a good person, and that’s who I’ve been working with all these cycles. That’s who I’ve come to admire and whose company I enjoy.”
His gaze was still latched to hers and this close, he could see everything. There were tears in her eyes and an earnestness that made his heart swell. She enjoyed his company. She’d trembled at his touch. That had to mean something, and if it didn’t…well, so be it. It was time to stop waiting.
“Evie.” He said her name reverently. “I need to tell you something.”
She went still. She didn’t even blink. “What is it?”
His heart hammered. The implant pulsed at the back of his neck, registering the spike, and he breathed through it. He could feel the heat in his face, the tightness in his chest, and underneath all of it, a certainty that he’d been carrying for cycles.
“I care deeply for you,” he said. “I think about you when you’re not here. I think about your voice and your hands and I want—” He cut himself off again, swallowed, and continued on. “You make me want to be someone who deserves to sit next to you.”
Her eyes went wide and her lips parted on a deep, shaky breath. She looked like she was readying herself, gathering the words for something important. Her expression was so open with emotion that his heart seized.
She was going to tell him she felt it too. He could see it in her face. Her eyes softened and she leaned forward, just slightly, closing the distance between them without seeming to realize it. She drew in a long breath and opened her mouth.
He kissed her.
His body moved before his mind gave permission. He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to hers and the world dropped away.
Her lips were warm. She froze against him for a heartbeat, her whole body going rigid, and then she melted. A small, broken sigh escaped her mouth and she kissed him back. Gently. Her lips moved against his with a tenderness that cracked something open in his chest, an ache that felt like joy.
Heat flooded through him. It spread from his mouth through his jaw, down his throat, across his chest, and settled low in his belly and his cock. His skin hummed. Every nerve ending in his body angled toward the point where they touched.
A sound rumbled up from his chest. It was low and primal as it rolled through his rib cage and into the space between them.
He’d never heard himself make that sound before, but his body knew it.
It was a groan of need and hunger. It growled, mine.
It meant the closest thing to joy his damaged mind could produce.
He raised his hand and cupped her face. His palm covered her cheek and his fingers slid into her hair. The feel of her skin against his hand was so overwhelming he shuddered. Her cheek was impossibly delicate. Heat rose in her face. Blood rushed to the surface under his touch.
His tail moved on its own, uncoiling from behind him and wrapping around her calf, the barb at the tip angled away from the fabric of her pants. He hadn’t chosen to do that but he couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried.
She pulled back with a gasp. Her hand came up between them, fingers spread in a clear message of stop. He felt the loss of her mouth like a physical tear. Cool air rushed in where her warmth had been. His hand stayed on her face for a moment, then dropped.
“Jarran—” she started.
And then the dark hit.
Pain split through his skull. Sharp, sudden, centered behind his eyes.
His vision went white, then black, and a feeling crashed through him that curdled his stomach.
It was cold, vast, and cruel, and felt like a darkness that didn’t belong to him, but was very much his.
For a terrible moment he was someone else.
Something else. He looked at the world with a calculating emptiness that made his blood turn to ice.
It was gone as fast as it came. A flash.
A flicker. But Evie had seen it. Whatever the darkness had done to his expression, she’d watched it happen.
How could she not, being right there in front of him?
The flushed, breathless softness from the kiss drained out of her expression and was replaced by fear for the first time.
Her eyes widened and her body jerked back.
Her hand, which had been held up, tensed. Her fingers spread wide.
He shifted backward to give them both space. His breath came in hard, ragged pulls and his vision swam. The implant fired, hard, a sharp pulse that made him grimace and grab the back of his neck.
“I’m not safe.” The words tore out of him. “Evie, I am not safe.”
Her fear melted into a deep, resigned sadness that settled into the lines of her face.
She didn’t argue with him. She didn’t tell him he was wrong.
She gazed at him with those light brown eyes and he knew then that she’d been expecting this.
She’d known that beyond the amnesia and the fragmented memories, she’d been waiting for the darkness to show itself.
Stars, he’d just kissed her. He could still taste her on his lips.
“Jarran, I—”
Before she could finish, every grow light in the bay switched from warm white to deep, pulsing crimson.
An alarm screamed through the space, making Evie yelp.
The plants around them were crimson under the emergency lights.
The toramdo fruit looked black. The air in his chest hung suspended as both he and Evie looked up.
“What is that?” Evie asked. Her voice was a thin whisper. “Has a patient escaped?”
Jarran listened. The alarm was a two-tone pattern.
Short, long, short, long. “No. When patients have problems, lights are orange. The alarm is buzz. Not this.” His speech slipped into the old, stilted fragments he used to use as stimuli and worry flooded his mind.
The only thing that mattered was protecting Evie and keeping her safe.
His muscles had tensed and he got to his feet, pulling her up with him. “The ship is under attack.”