18. Clean #3
Her back arches off the bunk. The seizure is short. Eleven seconds. I hold her on her side through it, one hand at her jaw and one at her hip, and I have broken males with these hands, and there is nothing in this cabin for the hands to do.
My claws are at full extension. Involuntary.
The body arming itself against a threat it cannot reach.
I hold my mate through a seizure with eight blades half an inch from her skin, and when it passes, I drive them into the deck plating rather than let them stay near her. The plating takes eight thin scores.
I have never hated my own hands before.
“Natalie. Stay.”
Her pulse on my overlay: 150. 154. Irregular at a rhythm that does not have a rhythm.
My overlay is red from edge to edge. Every number I have trusted my life to, flashing at thresholds, and not one of them is a thing I can put a blade in.
I have tracked ninety-four percent of everything I have ever been sent after.
I could find her on a station of three hundred and forty thousand by the salt of her skin alone.
And I am kneeling at my bunk with a wet cloth and a half-empty med-kit while the one signature that matters burns out of calibration in front of me, and there is nothing to track.
The threat is inside her.
My whole life is a skill that is useless in this room.
“Tael”, JINX says. “Decide.”
Pulse 158. Temperature 40.4.
“Half. Half the vial. Slow push.”
“Copy. For the record — I do not know the outcome.”
“I know you don’t. On me. All of it on me.”
I put the injector into the artery in her thigh. The plunger at half. My thumb is steady on a decision no part of me is steady about.
Then I count.
I count her pulse out loud in the empty cabin, because the counting is hers — it is the thing she does when the alternative is feeling — and she is not available to do it, so I do it for her. It is not my instrument. I play it badly. I count anyway.
158. 151. 149.
At 144 her fists unclench.
At 131 the fever breaks. It goes out of her the way weather leaves a system — all at once, sweat at her temples, her breath dropping into a rhythm that has a rhythm.
At 118 she says my name. Not the surname. The real one. Half the consonants missing, most of it asleep. It lands like a pulse.
At ninety-six I sit down on the deck beside the bunk because standing has stopped being available.
SENTRY, quiet: “She is stable, Tael. I have her.”
“You did not leave her”, JINX says.
“Where would I go.”
There is wetness on my face. I think it is sweat, but it could be tears. I no longer know.
I have now watched her nearly die twice since this morning.
Once from the poison. Once from the cure — my hand, my call, my gamble on her body with her voice not in the room.
She gave me a yes for the first vial. Nobody gave me one for the half.
When she wakes, she is going to want that conversation too, and I am going to owe her every word.
I do not go back to the cockpit. JINX flies. I sit on the deck with my hand in her hand and my claws’ scores in the plating beside me, and I watch the numbers hold.
Ninety-six. Ninety-six. Ninety-six.
The most beautiful, boring number I have ever read.
She wakes a short time later.
Her dark eyes find the overhead light. She rolls onto her side. She sees me.
Not in the pilot’s seat. On the deck beside the bunk, my hand still in hers, the med-kit open at my knee, the injector on the shelf with half a vial standing in it.
She reads the room the way she reads a scene. The kit. The half vial. The damp at her own temple. The ache she is going to find at the artery of her thigh. The eight thin scores in the deck plating.
“Something happened.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“The counteragent. Your body read it as an attack. Fever at 40.4. A seizure — eleven seconds. I gave you half of a second vial without your yes, because you were not available to give one, and JINX could not tell me whether it would save you or kill you faster.”
She is quiet. Her thumb moves once across my knuckles.
“I heard counting.”
“You were not available to do it yourself.”
Her eyes close. One breath. Two. When they open, they are wet, and she does not let the tears fall.
“We will have that conversation.”
“I know.”
“Not today.”
“Copy.”
She sits up slowly. Her hand at her ribs at the patch. She finds a pin on the shelf and puts her hair up, not loose — the configuration she uses when she has decided to have a conversation.
I get up from the deck. I go back to the pilot’s seat because the conversation she has pinned her hair for is one we are going to have side by side, facing the same stars.
She comes to the co-pilot’s seat, sits and straps in. Her face is tired but clear.
For forty seconds, we don’t speak.
She is looking at me.
The stars outside the viewport are moving.
She does not soften the question. She does not shape it as something her Head-of-Station voice can deliver clean. She delivers it the way she means it.
“You were going to die for me and not tell me?”
My hand on the yoke does not move.
JINX, somewhere in the background, logging.
My mate looking at me with her dark eyes clear and her composure honest and her hand at her ribs over the patch I set.
There is only one word available.
“Yes.”