Chapter 14 Brecca
Two days without his heartbeat and I was losing my mind.
Not literally. I was functional. I treated patients, changed dressings, monitored Elena's vitals, ate meals I didn't taste, slept in fits of twenty minutes between rounds.
I was doing everything I'd been doing for three years: keeping people alive, one body at a time, measuring my worth in pulse rates and wound closure and the simple binary of alive or dead.
But underneath the functionality, something was missing.
A frequency I'd grown used to, the way you grow used to the hum of electricity in walls, the ambient noise of civilization, the background radiation of being alive in a world full of sound.
His pulse had been my background radiation.
Fourteen beats per minute, warm and steady and impossibly far from human normal, and it had lived behind my sternum for weeks and now it was gone and the silence it left was louder than anything I'd ever heard.
I told myself it was better this way. Safer.
The connection had been a vulnerability; Tyvor had proved that by walking through it like a door and pouring his poison directly into my brain.
Without it, I was sealed. Protected. The way I'd been before Rael ever spoke my name in a voice with two tones and watched me with silver eyes and told me I was the first person who'd looked at him like he was a person.
Better. Safer. Alone.
I was making rounds when Kal found me.
He was sitting on a crate outside the supply tent, sharpening blades with Mark.
The two brothers worked in silence, the companionable quiet of men who'd been doing this together for centuries and didn't need conversation to fill the spaces between them.
Mark's dark braid fell over his shoulder as he worked.
Kal's Converse sneakers were propped on a second crate, and he'd pushed the sleeves of his leather jacket up past his elbows, exposing the tribal tattoos that wound around his forearms.
I was walking past them when Kal said, without looking up, "He hasn't eaten in two days."
I stopped. "Who?"
Kal gave me a look. The look said: don't insult my intelligence.
"That's not my problem," I said.
"He's sitting on the east ridge. He hasn't moved since Tuesday night. He's not eating, he's not drinking, and whatever that thing was that happened between you two, the thing where you could feel each other, it's gone. I can tell because he looks like someone cut out half his brain."
"Kal—"
"I know what it looks like." He set down the blade.
Met my eyes. His gold-flecked irises were steady and serious, which was unusual for Kal.
He was the comedian of the group, the one who cracked jokes about human customs and sang Journey in the shower.
When Kal was serious, it meant something.
"When Tess was taken from me in Chicago.
When the Council separated us and I couldn't feel her anymore. I know what the absence feels like."
"This isn't the same."
"It's exactly the same."
"He built a door into my mind. A hostile alien commander used that door to—"
"To hurt you. Yeah. I know. Tess told me.
" He picked up the blade again. Started sharpening.
The sound of steel on whetstone filled the air with a rhythmic scraping that sounded like something being worn down to its essential shape.
"You know what I did when Tess was taken?
I deserted. Left my unit, left my orders, left everything I'd been told was duty and honor and obligation.
Walked out into the human world alone, without support, without a plan, for a woman I hadn't even met yet. "
"You've told me this before."
"I haven't told you the part where I almost didn't." He looked at me.
"I almost stayed. I almost told myself that the duty was more important than the feeling.
That the risk was too great, that the smart thing was to stay inside the system and work within the rules and not throw away everything for something I couldn't quantify. "
Mark spoke without looking up from his blade. "He sang to himself for three days straight. Don't Stop Believin'. The entire barracks wanted to kill him."
"It was a coping mechanism," Kal said.
"It was a cry for help."
"The point," Kal said, turning back to me with the forced patience of a man whose brother had just undercut his dramatic moment, "is that I chose the scary thing.
And the scary thing turned into the best thing.
And right now you're choosing the safe thing, and the safe thing is making you both miserable. "
I stood there. The California sun was warm on my shoulders and the camp was alive with the noise of rebuilding and the sharp smell of fresh-cut lumber, and a Vampyren in Converse sneakers was telling me what I already knew and didn't want to hear.
"He could have gotten me killed," I said. "That connection—"
"He tore it out to save you. You know that, right? He didn't just close a door. He ripped a piece of his own mind out. That's what Lucian bond-severing is — it's an amputation."
I didn't respond.
"I'm not telling you what to do," Kal said. "I'm telling you what I see. I see a guy sitting on a rock who looks like someone removed his reason for living, and I see a woman who hasn't stopped moving in two days because if she stops moving she'll have to feel the hole where something used to be."
Mark looked up. Winked at me. "He's good at this. It's annoying."
"Go to hell, both of you," I said, but there was no heat in it, and they knew it, and I knew it.
I walked away. I did my rounds. I checked on Elena, who had eaten three spoonfuls of soup that morning, a record since her rescue.
I changed the dressing on a blood farm survivor's arm.
I inventoried antibiotics. I did all the things I always did, the mechanical work that had been my anchor for three years.
And then, at sunset, I stopped.
I stopped moving. I stood in my tent, alone, with the orange light of the California evening filtering through the canvas and the sound of the camp settling around me, and I stopped.
The hole was there. Kal was right. It was a hole, an absence, a silence where the warmth had been.
Not painful, exactly. Worse than painful.
Empty. The specific emptiness of a space that had been occupied and now wasn't, like a house after a death, still shaped around the presence that no longer lived there.
I missed him.
Past the psychic connection, past the tactical advantage, past the medical data.
I missed him. The way he sat perfectly still when he listened.
The deeper register in his voice when he said my name.
The ghost of the almost-smile that transformed his alien features into something warm.
The way he'd held his palm open and let me choose whether to take it, and the way his skin had warmed under my touch, and the way the light had spread along his veins like a map of everything he felt.
I missed the person who'd looked at me and seen not a medic, not a function, not a survival tool, but a woman who was worth being seen.
"God damn it," I said.
I grabbed a water canteen and a protein bar from my supplies.
Walked out of the tent. Walked past the mess area, past the garden, past the perimeter fence and the watchtower where the evening guard nodded at me as I passed.
Walked east, toward the ridge, toward the rock where a Lucian sat alone in the gathering dark.
* * *
He hadn't moved.
Kal was right about that too. Rael was exactly where he'd been for two days — sitting on a flat stone at the edge of the ridge, his legs folded beneath him, his back straight, his face turned toward the valley below.
The last light of the sun caught his skin and it didn't glow.
The luminescence I'd documented, the silver-blue shimmer that activated in low light.
Dark. Dormant. Like a lamp with no power source.
He looked diminished. His body was the same: still six-three, still lean and angular and built like something designed for speed.
But the vitality was gone. The quiet intensity that characterized his stillness, the focused presence that made him feel larger than his frame.
Muted. Dampened. The way his skin was dampened.
Everything about him pulled inward, conserving what little energy remained.
"You look terrible," I said.
He didn't turn. "Brecca."
"Eat this." I put the protein bar in his hand. "And drink this." I set the canteen beside him.
He looked at the protein bar. Then at me. His silver eyes held a tiredness that went past sleeplessness, the exhaustion of a mind that had performed surgery on itself and was still bleeding.
"You told me to leave," he said.
"I'm telling you to eat. Different instruction."
He ate the protein bar. He drank the water. I sat down beside him on the rock and looked at the valley and didn't say anything for a while.
The silence between us was different now.
Without the link, I couldn't feel his emotional state: no warmth, no texture, no pulse against my awareness.
Just the physical silence of two people sitting close enough to touch and choosing not to.
Ordinary silence. Human silence. The kind I'd been living in for three years before a Lucian prisoner changed everything.
I hated it.
"I was wrong to send you away," I said.
"You were not. Tyvor used what lay between us. I was the vulnerability. You had every right to—"
"I was wrong." I looked at him. "I was afraid, and I was angry, and I was hurt, and I used all of those things as an excuse to push you away because pushing people away is the thing I'm best at. Better than medicine. Better than phlebotomy. World-class pushing-people-away."
"Brecca—"