Chapter 13 Rael #2
She looked up at me and her eyes were wrong.
Dilated pupils, rapid blinking, the unfocused stare of a mind processing input from two sources simultaneously: her own senses and Tyvor's broadcast. Blood was running from her nose.
A thin line of red, bright against her pale skin, tracking from her left nostril to her upper lip.
"Get out of her head," I said. Not to Brecca. To Tyvor. To the presence lodged in the connection like a hook in flesh.
Make me.
I had one option. One terrible, permanent, irrevocable option.
I severed it.
Not gently. Not the careful dampening I'd been practicing for weeks.
I reached into the core of my psychic consciousness, found the tendrils of what connected us, the warm, bright threads that linked my mind to Brecca's, the frequencies I'd been nurturing since the first day she touched my skin, and I tore them out.
The pain was indescribable. If Tyvor's assault was a blade, this was an amputation, cutting away part of my own mind, ripping the connection from my consciousness the way you'd rip a plant from soil, roots and all.
The psychic network screamed. The network itself, reacting to the violence of something being forcibly destroyed.
The sound existed in a frequency that only I could hear, and it sounded like grief.
The connection to Brecca snapped.
Her presence vanished from my awareness.
The warm heartbeat that had been my constant companion for weeks.
Gone. The emotional texture I'd learned to read, the frequencies I'd memorized, the shape of her consciousness that I'd come to know as well as my own.
Gone. Like a star extinguished. Like a room going dark.
The absence was so sudden and so total that I staggered and nearly fell.
Tyvor's attack cut off. Without the connection, he had no bridge to Brecca's mind.
Without it, I had no vulnerability he could exploit.
He was back in my mind, only my mind, and I slammed the dampening down so hard and so fast that his presence was crushed out of my consciousness like a candle flame snuffed by a closing fist.
Silence. In my mind, silence. The terrible, echoing, absolute silence of a mind that had been connected and was now alone.
Brecca was still on the floor. The nosebleed had stopped.
She was breathing hard, fast, shallow breaths that I recognized as hyperventilation even without a psychic link to confirm it.
Her hands were shaking. Her eyes found mine and for a moment I saw it: recognition, relief, the flash of warmth that I'd perceived a thousand times through a connection that no longer existed.
Then it was gone. Replaced by something colder. Something I deserved.
"What," she said, her voice cracked and raw and vibrating with a fury I could no longer perceive as a frequency but could read in every line of her body, "the fuck was that?"
"Tyvor. He found the link between us. He used it to—"
"I know what he did. I felt it. I felt him—" She pressed her hands over her face. "I felt everything. His mind. His rage. The things he showed me—"
"They were real. Everything he showed you was real. The things I watched happen. The things I didn't stop."
She lowered her hands. Looked at me. And I saw the moment the fury found its target. Me.
"You brought this here," she said. "You. The bond. The connection. It's a door. And he walked right through it."
"I severed it. He can't—"
"He was in my head, Rael. He was in my head and he showed me your people killing, heads on—" She stopped. Pressed her hand against her mouth. The hyperventilation was getting worse. "He showed me what you watched. What you stood there and watched."
"I know."
"Three hundred years. You told me about the guilt, and I thought I understood. I thought you were brave for telling me. But I didn't feel it before. I didn't feel what it was like to stand there and watch people die and do nothing and—"
"Brecca—"
"Don't." She stood up. Her legs weren't steady but she stood anyway, because she was Brecca and she would stand on broken legs before she'd stay on the floor. "Don't say my name. Don't." Her breath caught. "The bond is gone?"
"I severed it."
"Good. Keep it severed." Her voice was shaking. "You brought him to us. The raid, the deaths, and now this. He used you to get to me. To get to this camp. Every piece of intelligence you've given us, every moment of trust, he was watching. He was always watching."
"He was not. I was dampened—"
"Not enough. Obviously not enough, because he just projected his greatest hits directly into my brain." She wiped the blood from her nose with the back of her hand and looked at the red smear on her skin and something in her face closed like a door slamming. "Get out of my tent."
"Brecca—"
"Get out."
I left.
I walked through the camp in the dark, past the guards who stared at me, past the tents where people slept, past the fence I'd helped build and the watchtower I'd helped erect, and I kept walking until I reached the camp's eastern perimeter, where the hills dropped away into the darkness of the valley below and the lights of the city, what was left of them, flickered in the distance like dying stars.
I sat on a rock and pressed my hands flat against my thighs and breathed.
The silence in my mind was total. No bond. No warmth. No heartbeat other than my own, slow and steady and utterly alone. The network was sealed behind the thickest dampening I'd ever built. Tyvor's voice reduced to the faintest pressure, a hand pressing against a closed door.
I was alone. More alone than I'd been since the day I was born on a ship between dead worlds, because at least then I'd had the network.
The shared grief, the communal consciousness, the knowledge that somewhere in the dark, other minds were feeling what I felt.
Now I had nothing. The network was sealed.
The connection was severed. The woman who had looked at me like I was a person and drawn my blood and touched my skin and felt the shape of my loneliness and said I'll be back tomorrow. She'd told me to get out.
I thought: Tyvor was right. I am a coward who found a convenient cause.
I thought: every person who has trusted me has suffered for it.
I thought: she is better off without the link. Without me. Without the door I built into her mind that let a monster walk through.
And in the terrible silence of my severed consciousness, I sat on a rock at the edge of a human camp on a planet that wasn't mine and I did something I had not done since I was a child on a ship between dead worlds.
I grieved.
Not for Lucis. Not for the homeworld I'd never seen or the civilization I'd never known.
I grieved for a connection that had lasted weeks.
Weeks. The warmest thing I'd ever perceived in all my centuries of sensing other minds.
A human woman who swore at me and drew my blood and called me an idiot and looked at me like I was worth saving.
A heartbeat that had synchronized with mine across species and biology and every impossible year between us.
Gone now. Severed. Torn out by my own hands to protect her from what I was.
The night was very dark. The stars were very far away. And I sat alone at the edge of everything and felt, for the first time in my life, what it truly meant to be the last of something.