Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Jarran woke in the bed with Evie to pain that pulsed through his entire skull.
It felt like a deep, drilling pressure, and he couldn’t remember ever having a headache like it.
He lay still and waited for it to pass. It didn’t.
It just got worse. The pain spread down the back of his neck and settled into the base of his spine.
It had to be the implant, which was still active.
Durik had said it would be removed, but that hadn’t happened.
The device sat at the base of his skull.
It was a hard lump he could feel when he pressed his fingers there, and it made the skin there warm.
He didn’t know if it was malfunctioning or if it was doing what it was designed to do.
Evie slept peacefully beside him. Her breathing was slow and even, and in the dim light, he marveled at the beautiful female who had allowed him to bring her pleasure the night before. He didn’t deserve her, but if she would have him, he’d find a way to earn her love.
He eased out of the bed carefully, keeping his movements slow, and crossed to the bathroom. His vision blurred at the edges. Each step sent a jolt through his skull.
He made it to the toilet, dropped to his knees, and vomited.
It was violent and sudden. His stomach heaved again. When it was done, he sat back on his heels, pressed his palms against his forehead, and tried to breathe.
He flushed with shaking hands. Then he sat down on the bathroom floor, drew his knees up, and rested his forehead against his forearms. The tile was cool against his bare feet. He concentrated on breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The pain crested and ebbed and crested again.
He heard her footsteps padding tentatively into the bathroom.
“Jarran?”
He didn’t lift his head. “I’m fine.”
“You’re sitting on the bathroom floor in the dark.” A pause. “And it smells like…” Her feet appeared at the edge of his vision. She knelt in front of him. “Look at me.”
He tried to raise his head, but the movement sent a spike of pain through his left temple. She put her hands on his face, her palms cool against his jaw, and tilted his head so she could look at his eyes. Her thumbs brushed his cheekbones.
Something broke.
He didn’t know how else to describe it. The soft press of her fingers was like a balm, and the wall inside his skull gave way. Every barrier his mind had built came apart at once, and everything that had been held back flooded through in a single, annihilating wave.
He grabbed her wrists. He knew his grip was too tight but he couldn’t let go because the floor was falling away and her hands were the only solid thing left. His vision whited out. Sound rushed in and out and the bathroom vanished and he was somewhere else.
He was everywhere else. For a long, disorienting moment, he was every age he’d ever been, all at the same time.
He heard himself make a sound. Low and guttural, pulled from somewhere deep in his chest. Evie’s voice reached him from far away, calm and steady, repeating his name.
“Jarran. Stay with me. Jarran.”
He held on to her wrists and breathed and let it come.
The flood slowed to a current, the current to a stream.
The details settled into place, one after another, like stones dropping to the bottom of a deep well.
When it was over, he was sitting on the bathroom floor with Evie, and he knew everything.
Every single thing. He released her hands, hating that he’d caused her discomfort.
“Jarran.” Her voice was careful. “What just happened?”
“I remember.” His rough voice didn’t sound like his own. “Everything. I remember all of it.”
Her hands went still on his face. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t move at all. “Tell me.”
He took a breath. His lungs shuddered. He lowered her hands from his face but kept hold of one, lacing his fingers through hers, and he told her.
“I was sixteen when they took me.” He stared at the bathroom tile. “I was walking the ridge trail above the underground city, wearing a surface suit. Taron was supposed to come with me but he was sick that day. I was alone.”
She squeezed his hand.
“There were three of them. Sifters. They drugged me and I woke up in a cave system, deep underground. It was dark and cold and the air smelled like metal.” He paused. “There was a male there. Waiting for me.”
“Who was he?”
“He called himself Xill Rin.” The name felt wrong in his mouth.
Rotten. “I thought he was Virilian. He looked similar. But he had no tail, and he was shorter and stockier. Built differently. And he had…” Jarran touched his own face.
“His eyes were both cybernetic. They looked different from each other. One was red, the other silver. And one of his arms was mechanical. Metal from the shoulder down.” He swallowed.
“He had a tube running into his nose. It fed him something, I never knew what. Medicine, maybe. Nutrients. He was old and falling apart and the cybernetic parts were holding him together.”
“He was dying,” Evie said quietly.
“Yes.” Jarran closed his eyes. “He was dying, and he needed somewhere to put everything he knew.”
He felt Evie shift beside him. She settled against the wall, her shoulder pressing into his, and kept hold of his hand.
“What did he do to you?” Her voice was steady. Clinical, almost. The doctor’s voice.
“He broke me.” Simple words for a simple fact.
“Isolation first. He kept me in the dark for long stretches. No food, no water, no sound. When I started to lose my sense of time, he’d bring light and food and talk to me.
He was the only voice I heard. The only face I saw.
” Jarran’s jaw tightened. “Then pain, when I resisted what he was teaching me. And then there were medical procedures. He’d strap me down and, ah…
” He trailed off. “You don’t need the details. ”
“Okay.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Jarran opened his eyes. “He was making me into Pella Rin. His legacy. His…” He waved a hand, searching for the right word.
“Continuation. He taught me everything he knew about the Sifters, about bioengineering, about tactics and power and control; he put it all into me. Piece by piece. He dismantled who I was and built his protégé on top of it.”
“The same technology you used later,” Evie said. “On the females.”
The connection hit him and his stomach lurched. “Yes. The same principles. I learned it from him. Or Pella Rin did. The boundaries were already blurring by then.”
“How long were you in the cave?”
“Two tericycles.” He felt her hand tighten on his. “I fought it, Evie. You have to understand that. I fought it for as long as I could.”
“I know you did.”
“There was a point…” His voice cracked. He pressed his free hand against his eyes.
The tears were coming again and he let them.
“There was a point where I could feel myself disappearing. I knew I was losing. After every procedure, the pieces of me became smaller and the thing he was building grew bigger, and I tried to hold on.”
She didn’t speak. She held his hand and waited.
“My last thought.” His throat closed around the words.
He forced them out. “My last thought as myself was about Taron. I was thinking about my brother’s face.
His laugh. The way he used to follow me around the settlement and copy everything I did.
” His hands clenched into fists. “I was holding on to that, and then I couldn’t hold on anymore, and something else looked out through my eyes.
And that was the last of me for a very long time. ”
Evie’s breath caught. A small, tight sound.
“When I came out of the cave, I looked like Jarran, but I was Pella Rin.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“Xill Rin died shortly after. The tube and the cybernetics couldn’t keep him alive forever.
But it didn’t matter. He’d already transferred everything that he was into me.
His knowledge, his ambition, his cruelty.
You were right; I was his immortality. He even named me after him. ”
“And the Sifters?”
“Pella Rin joined them at maturity and ended up leading them. That was the programming. And a few years later, I—or rather, Pella Rin—returned to Virilia to recruit Taron, and Taron followed me. My family must have been devastated. To lose both sons…” He stopped.
Drew a breath. “Taron didn’t understand that Jarran was gone.
He followed a ghost into the Sifters and it nearly destroyed him. ”
“But Taron did leave,” she said gently. “And he has a wonderful life, full of love. He’s no longer an exile.”
“Good.” He looked up with a soft smile. “He deserves happiness. Taron had the courage to leave when I couldn’t.” Jarran stared at the far wall. “He was the better one. Always.”
Evie’s thumb moved against his knuckles, a slow, steady stroke. “He also wasn’t subjected to neurological procedures that altered his brain. If you hadn’t been put through what you were, you’d never have joined.”
This was true, but it was little consolation.
“I remember creating the females.” His voice went flat.
“I remember the science because Xill Rin’s knowledge was in my head.
It was efficient and it worked. I remember not caring about their faces, or their names, or their wishes.
All I cared about was how well they could perform. ”
He stopped. Breathed.
“And I remember shooting that Virilian male right before I was hit with that dose of terti powder. He was standing in front of me and I shot him in the chest. I watched him fall and I felt nothing.” He shook his head. “Pella Rin felt nothing. But I do.”
Evie was quiet beside him. “Perhaps one day you can tell him so. His name is Niir, and he’s also alive and well.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “Thank the stars for that. And for the terti powder explosion,” he said. “That’s what ended it.”
“The blast was like a reset to your brain. The programming, the conditioning, was wiped clean.” She tilted her head and peered at him. “Not destroyed, unfortunately. But we can work on that, when we get out of here.”
He nodded. Anything to rid himself of the traces of Pella Rin. “When I woke up on Korath-7, I was Patient 9. And Patient 9 is better than Pella Rin.”
She met his gaze. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. “Now that you know, what do you feel?”
He considered the question. Every memory carried its own weight of horror and grief and guilt.
The boy in the cave. The warlord in the command room.
The farmer in the planting rows. Three lives lived in one body, and he could feel all of them, pressing against his ribs and his lungs and his heart, filling every hollow space that had been empty for so long.
“I feel everything,” he said.
She watched his face. “Does remembering make you want to be Pella Rin again?”
“No.” The word came out hard and certain. “It makes me want to remain Jarran.”
She put her arms around him. He put his around her. She was small and warm and solid and she smelled like clean skin and the sheets they’d slept in together. He pressed his face into her hair and held her and breathed.
They stayed like that for a while. Long enough that the lights in the suite brightened fully, simulating morning. Soon, his breathing steadied and the memories dulled just enough to bear.
When he pulled back, the headache had changed. The drilling pressure was gone, replaced by something different. A sensation at the front of his mind, just behind his forehead. Pushing. Steady and deliberate, like a hand pressing on a closed door from the other side.
“Something is wrong,” he said.
Evie straightened. “The headache?”
“It’s different now. It feels like…” He searched for the words. “Like something is trying to get in. Pushing against my mind.”
Her expression shifted. The softness left her face and the clinician emerged, sharp and alert. She reached for his head, her fingers probing the base of his skull where the implant sat. “The implant. Can you feel it?”
“Yes. But it’s—”
The lock on the suite door disengaged and they both froze. Footsteps crossed the outer room. Multiple sets. Boots on polished floor.
Jarran was on his feet before he finished the thought, pulling Evie behind him, putting his body between her and the bathroom doorway.
His muscles locked. The old instincts fired, sharp and immediate, and he hated that they were Pella Rin’s instincts.
He used them anyway because the only thought in his addled mind was keeping Evie safe.
Durik appeared in the bathroom archway. Two of the hybrid females flanked him, tall and blank-faced, standing at attention with weapons holstered at their hips.
His pale eyes swept the scene. Jarran, shirtless and tear-streaked, standing barefoot on the tile.
Evie behind him, still in her sleep clothes, one hand gripping the back of his arm.
Durik’s mouth curved.
“Behold,” he said to his companions. “The great Pella Rin, barefoot and trembling in a bathroom.”