Chapter 5 Zara #2
"Imprinting is not symmetrical. The imprinted feels the bonded. Not the reverse. Not initially."
"Not initially?"
"Over time, proximity and shared experience can create a secondary channel. The bonded begins to sense the imprinted's emotional state. But this is rare and typically requires significant duration."
"How significant?"
"Months. Sometimes years."
So what I'm feeling is mine. The awareness of him, the way his presence in the corridor has shifted the temperature of the room, the way his voice hits somewhere in my chest that doesn't have anything to do with resonance frequencies, that's all me.
No biological shortcut. No alien bond magic.
Just me, a thirty-year-old fugitive, reacting to an eight-foot alien who says exactly what he means and has four arms and glowing skin and who looked at me in a glass cell with eyes like deep space and made me feel, for one impossible moment, like the choice I made was right.
That's terrifying.
"We should talk about security," I say. "For when we dock at the Calloway refueling station."
"You are changing the subject."
"I'm prioritizing. Security is a higher priority than sleeping arrangements."
He accepts this. He always accepts this. When I redirect, he follows. Not because he's passive but because he trusts my judgment on sequencing. What comes first. What matters most. He may be the warrior, but I'm the one who sets the order of operations.
I walk him through the plan. Docking at the inner ring station, Beacon Point. Fuel, food, parts. In and out in four hours. Voss handles the docking negotiations. Kael stays on the ship. I handle the supply runs because I can move through a crowd without turning heads.
"You want me to remain on the ship," he says.
"You're eight feet tall with four arms and you glow. You are the opposite of covert."
"I can dim."
"You can dim, not disappear. Helix is looking for a Vorath. Any Vorath sighting in Calloway will trigger a flag. You stay on the ship."
"If you encounter danger, I will not be able to reach you."
"If I encounter danger, I'll run. Running is my current area of expertise."
He does not like this. I can tell because his markings brighten and the resonance thing he does, the low-frequency vibration that I feel in my ribcage, shifts to a higher pitch. Agitation.
"Kael. I need you to trust my planning."
"I trust your planning. I do not trust the Calloway system."
"Neither do I. Which is why the plan has three contingencies and two emergency exits. I don't walk into places I can't walk out of."
He holds my gaze. Then he nods, once, that slow deliberate movement.
"I will remain on the ship. But I will monitor the station's public communication channels."
"You can do that?"
"Vorath hearing operates across a wider frequency range than human hearing. I can detect transmissions that your communication equipment cannot."
"You're a walking antenna."
"I do not know what an antenna is, but I believe the comparison is reductive."
I almost smile. Almost.
"Beacon Point in six hours," I say. "Get some rest before then. I set up your sleeping area in the cargo bay."
"Already?"
"I did it while we were talking. Moved the crates, laid the blankets, checked the deck support. You didn't notice because I sent the cargo drones to do it remotely."
I hold up my datapad. The cargo bay camera shows a cleared section of deck with thermal blankets arranged in a space that's precisely Kael-sized. I measured using the ship's internal dimensions and his approximate body dimensions as observed when he folded himself into the shuttle.
He looks at the screen. Then at me.
"You measured me."
"I estimated your dimensions for logistical purposes. Don't make it weird."
"You have said 'don't make it weird' twice."
"Because you keep making it weird."
"I am stating facts."
"Weird facts."
He makes a sound, low, brief, almost inaudible. A vibration more than a vocalization. I feel it in my chest. It's warm.
"Was that a laugh?" I ask.
"It was acknowledgment."
"It felt like a laugh."
"Vorath do not laugh."
"What do you do when something is funny?"
"We resonate at a specific frequency that communicates amusement to other Vorath."
"That's laughing. You just laugh with your whole body instead of your mouth."
He considers this. "Perhaps."
We stand in the corridor of a beat-up freighter flying through a system we shouldn't be in, hunted by a corporation that wants us dead, and for a moment the fear organizes itself into background noise and there's just this: a conversation that feels, against all probability, easy.
Then the ship's proximity alarm chirps. Voss's voice cuts through the intercom.
"Heads up. Scanner's picking up a Helix patrol ship at the edge of the system. They're not close, but they're running a sensor sweep. Everyone shut up and let me fly."
The fear reorganizes itself back to the foreground.
I head for the cockpit. Kael heads for the cargo bay. The Rust Bucket flies on, quiet and ugly and invisible, and I pull up the scanner data and start calculating evasion routes because that's what I do.
Always another spreadsheet. Always another plan.
Always running.