Chapter 8 Brecca #2
"Could you feel—" I stopped. Swallowed. Because if he could feel my emotional state, then he knew.
He already knew about the nights I'd spent lying awake thinking about him.
About the way my pulse jumped when I walked toward his tent.
About every moment of fascination and attraction and terrified interest that I'd been telling myself was purely scientific.
"I feel your heartbeat accelerate when you are near me," he said, very quietly. "I feel it slow when you leave. I feel—" He stopped. "I should not tell you what I feel. It is a violation of privacy that my people would consider—"
"Tell me."
Our eyes met. The tent was very quiet. Outside, the camp existed — voices, footsteps, the clang of tools, the ordinary machinery of two hundred people surviving another day. Inside, there was just his breathing and mine.
"You are afraid," he said. "Not of me. Of what is happening between us. Your fear tastes like copper on the back of my tongue."
I couldn't breathe.
"And underneath the fear—" His voice dropped to almost nothing. The deeper register vibrated in my chest. "Underneath it, there is warmth. Directed at me. It is the warmest thing I have felt since Lucis fell and I—"
"Stop." I held up my hand. My fingers were still tingling. "Just — stop. I need a second."
He stopped. He sat perfectly still and waited while I pressed my hands against my face and breathed and tried to process the fact that an alien from a destroyed civilization could feel my emotions through a psychic network that wasn't supposed to work on humans, and that the emotions he was feeling were exactly the ones I'd been telling myself didn't exist.
"What is this?" I asked, lowering my hands. "This connection. This bond. What does it become?"
"Among my people, a bond begins with proximity and emotional resonance.
Two minds that keep finding each other. It strengthens through contact, physical and psychic.
Eventually, if both minds consent, it deepens into something more permanent.
A shared consciousness. Not mind-reading — more like...
standing in the same room as someone's thoughts.
You feel the shape of them, the temperature of them, without reading the specific words. "
"Like a radio finding a frequency," I said.
"Yes." Something flickered across his face. Surprise, maybe, at the precision of the analogy. "Exactly like that."
"And we're already—"
"We are already tuning in."
I sat with that. The weight of it. The impossibility of it. A human woman and a Lucian prisoner in a tent in the hills above a ruined city, and something between them was doing what physics and biology said shouldn't be possible.
"I should leave," I said.
"Yes."
"I should leave and I should stop coming here and I should request that someone else handle your medical care."
"Yes. You should do all of those things."
I held his gaze. His silver eyes. The faint glow of his skin in the tent's shadow.
The elegant alien architecture of his face and the quiet, measured way he held himself and the fact that underneath all of it, underneath the three hundred years of trauma and the shattered civilization and the psychic network and the complicity he carried like a stone, he was looking at me like I was the answer to a question he'd been asking his whole life.
"I'll be back tomorrow," I said.
Something moved through his expression. Relief, maybe, or the Lucian equivalent of it. A softening of the muscles around his eyes. The ghost of what was almost, almost a smile.
"I know," he said.
I left the tent. The sunlight outside was blinding after the dimness, and I stood there blinking for a few seconds, trying to remember what I'd been doing before I went in.
Normal things. Camp things. There were patients waiting.
Jonas had mentioned a supply run coming in this afternoon.
I had rounds to do, vitals to check, a pregnant woman to monitor, a camp of two hundred people who needed me to be functional and focused and not standing outside a prisoner's tent touching my own hand like it belonged to someone else.
I went to the medical tent. I did rounds. I checked on the man whose Lucian spike wound was healing well. I changed the dressing on a woman's infected forearm. I inventoried antibiotics. Normal work. Mechanical. The kind of work that had been my anchor for three years.
I couldn't concentrate on any of it.
Every few minutes, my awareness would drift toward a feeling. A warmth. Faint, persistent, located somewhere behind my sternum. Beyond heartburn, beyond anxiety. A presence. Like standing in a room with a fireplace you couldn't see but could feel.
His heartbeat. Four hundred yards away, through canvas and air and the impossible distance between two species that had never been meant to connect.
His heartbeat pulsed against my awareness like a point of warm light, and no amount of clinical detachment or professional composure could make it stop.
"You look weird," Crystal said. She'd appeared at the medical tent's entrance with the supernatural ability to materialize precisely when you least wanted company. "Are you sick?"
"No."
"You're staring at a bottle of iodine like it owes you money."
"I'm doing inventory."
"You're doing inventory of one bottle. That you've been holding for three minutes."
I put the iodine down. "Did you need something, Crystal?"
She looked at me with those sharp, knowing eyes that missed nothing and forgave less.
Crystal was terrifying in the way that only a woman who'd survived Vampyren captivity through sheer force of competence and bitchiness could be.
She reminded me of myself, which was probably why I couldn't decide if I liked her or wanted to avoid her.
"Mark says the prisoner's been cooperating with the intelligence interviews," she said, leaning against the tent pole. "Alek's getting useful data on Lucian movement patterns."
"Good."
"He also says the prisoner only talks when you're around."
"That's not—"
"Alek tried questioning him yesterday afternoon while you were on rounds.
Got nothing. Single-word answers. Then you came back from checking on Tess and, according to the guards, the prisoner started talking again within fifteen minutes.
" She tilted her head, arms crossed, ponytail swinging.
"That's either a fascinating medical phenomenon or something else entirely. "
"It's a trust dynamic. He was captured, injured, imprisoned. I'm his primary caregiver. Patients form attachments to caregivers. It's well-documented in—"
"Stockholm syndrome? That usually goes the other direction."
"It's not Stockholm syndrome. It's—" I stopped. Took a breath. "Crystal, I really don't need an interrogation right now."
She held up her hands. "Fine. Not my business. Just — for the record — I watched my own denial phase from the inside, so I know exactly what it looks like from the outside." She pushed off the tent pole. "When you're ready to stop lying to yourself, come find me. I've got vodka."
She left. I stood in the medical tent and stared at the bottle of iodine and thought about the warmth in my mind and the tingling in my fingers and the way his skin had glowed under my touch and the way his voice had sounded when he said you are not opaque to me.
I pressed my tingling fingers against my chest and felt, very faintly, like a signal received through interference: his heartbeat. His actual heartbeat. Slow and steady and four hundred yards away, pulsing against my awareness like a distant star.
"Fuck," I said, to no one.
The star pulsed on. Warm and constant and absolutely, irrevocably there.