Chapter 6 Brecca #2
I deflated the cuff and wrote down the numbers. "Kal should focus on preparing for his baby instead of gossiping about my patient interactions."
Tess laughed, a real laugh, startled and warm. "God, you sound just like me. That's exactly what I said to Kal when he first started worrying about everything. 'Focus on something else.' And you know what he said?"
"What?"
"He said, 'I can't focus on something else. You are the something else.'" She looked at me, and her expression was softer than I'd seen it since she arrived. "Sometimes the thing you can't stop thinking about is the thing."
"That's very zen of you."
"I'm eight months pregnant with an alien's baby. Everything is zen now." She shifted on the pillows, wincing. "But seriously, Brecca. Crystal and I have been talking—"
"Crystal."
"Don't make that face. She's scary but she's smart.
She thinks the prisoner's presence is going to be a problem if the Lucian track him here, which seems likely.
She and I have been looking at the maps — the holdout Vampyren positions downtown, the Lucian territory to the south, the camp's defensive vulnerabilities. "
"You're doing tactical planning."
"I'm doing something useful. Kal won't let me patrol or scout or do anything that involves walking more than fifty yards. So yeah, I'm doing tactical planning from a cot."
I looked at her — eight months pregnant, swollen ankles, carrying a half-alien baby that would be born with gold eyes and two hearts, and she was running war strategy from a medical tent because being sidelined was worse than being in danger.
"You're remarkable," I said, and I meant it.
"I'm pissed off," Tess corrected. "But I'll take remarkable."
She showed me what she and Crystal had been working on — hand-drawn maps of the camp's perimeter and the surrounding territory, patrol routes marked in different colors, sight lines and approach vectors noted in Crystal's neat handwriting.
They'd identified three approaches the Lucian could use if they decided to hit the camp, and two of them were essentially undefended.
"We need watchtowers on the north and east ridges," Tess said, pointing. "And we need to mine the south approach — not explosives, we don't have those, but tripwires with noise-makers. Anything that gives us warning."
"Have you shown this to Loren?"
"I showed it to Crystal, who showed it to Mark, who showed it to Alek, who is currently building the watchtowers.
" She smiled. It was the smile of a woman who had learned that the most effective way to operate was to route her suggestions through the people most likely to implement them. "The system works."
I thought about Tess and Crystal, planning defenses from a medical tent.
About Cassi in the city, scouting blood farms. About Mindy, who'd been quietly organizing the camp's weapons inventory with the efficiency of someone who'd survived a Vampyren harem and come out the other side with a detailed understanding of exactly how much firepower was needed to never be captured again.
These women. Every one of them had been broken and every one of them had rebuilt themselves into something the invaders hadn't anticipated: people who refused to stop fighting, adapting, planning, even when the odds were impossible and the enemy was alien and the future was a black void.
I thought about myself. Standing in a medical tent, drawing alien blood into glass vials, documenting the biology of a species nobody understood, talking to a prisoner who said my name in a voice with two tones and watched me like I was the most important thing he'd ever seen.
Was I rebuilding? Or was I just going through the motions the same way I'd been going through them for three years, and the only thing that had changed was that now there was something interesting to look at while I did it?
* * *
I went back to his tent in the evening.
"Just checking the wound," I said.
It was nearly healed. A thin silver line where the deep gash had been — a scar, but barely. In another day there would be nothing.
"Your healing is remarkable," I said, documenting. "Even dampened."
"You said that already."
I looked up. He was watching me with what might have been amusement. I'd never seen anything close to humor on his face before. It changed his features, made the alien architecture of his bones feel less severe, more accessible. Almost warm.
"I'm a scientist," I said. "We repeat observations for verification."
"You are a healer," he said. "Scientists study things that are dead. You study things that are alive."
"I study you because keeping you alive is my job."
"Is that the only reason?"
I put down the notebook. "You ask a lot of questions for someone who barely talks."
"Among my people, questions are the most important form of communication.
To ask a question is to offer trust — it reveals what you do not know, which is a kind of vulnerability.
" He paused. The effort of this much speech was visible: a tightness in his throat, a slight strain in his voice.
"I am choosing to be vulnerable with you. "
Something shifted in my chest. A tightening. A warmth.
"Why do humans bond in pairs?" he asked. "One and one. Exclusive. You give yourselves to a single other person and call it love."
"That's — a big question."
"Among my people, before the wandering, consciousness was shared.
We felt what everyone felt. There was no isolation, no exclusivity.
Connection was the water we swam in." His silver eyes held mine.
"To choose one person above all others would have been...
incomprehensible. To us, love was not a river flowing between two points.
It was an ocean. Everyone was immersed."
"That sounds beautiful," I said, before I could stop myself.
"It was." His voice dropped. The harmonic undertone deepened, carrying a taste like grief, though I couldn't have explained what grief tasted like.
"Tyvor destroyed it. He took the ocean and turned it into a weapon.
Now we feel each other's pain instead of each other's joy.
The network that was communion became surveillance.
Shared consciousness became enforced obedience. "
I sat very still.
"But you asked about human bonding," he said, pulling himself back from wherever he'd gone. "Why pairs?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "Maybe because the world is so big and so brutal that finding one person who sees you — really sees you — feels like enough. Like a miracle."
He looked at me. The silence between us was dense and warm and my pulse was hammering in my throat and I knew — I knew — he could feel it too, through whatever remnant of the psychic connection was forming between us, and the thought of being that transparent to anyone terrified me more than the Lucian outside the camp ever had.
"I should go," I said.
"Yes," he said. "You should."
Neither of us moved for a long moment. The tent was dim and close and his skin had that faint luminescence again, a soft glow that turned the shadows blue-silver.
I could see the scar from the rib wound — a thin silver line against pale skin — and the way the light caught the fine white hair at his temples and the sharp angle of his jaw and the curve of his mouth, which was not a human mouth but was shaped in a way that made my brain want to use the word gentle, which was insane because he was a member of a species that killed people by removing their heads.
I stood up. Shouldered my kit. Left.
I walked back to my tent and sat on my cot and pressed my hands flat against my thighs and breathed until my heartbeat slowed.
I was not falling for a Lucian prisoner.
I was not.
I opened the notebook and started writing clinical observations and I wrote for an hour and none of it had anything to do with medicine.