Chapter 14 Brecca #2
"I'm not done." I took a breath. "Cassi told me once that I can't keep everyone alive and keep no one close.
She said it the first day I walked into camp and I told her she was wrong.
I told myself I was built for this. The distance.
The detachment. The clinical approach to a world that was trying to kill us.
I told myself that not caring was how I survived. "
"It is how you survived."
"It's how I hid. There's a difference." I looked at my hands.
The hands that had drawn his blood and touched his skin and felt the connection form.
"You told me that among your people, the bond between minds was the deepest form of trust. You said it was what warriors shared before a battle from which they might not return. "
"The bond between mates," he said quietly.
"I want it back."
He went very still. The glow under his skin, dormant for two days, flickered. A pulse, barely visible, like a pilot light catching.
"Tyvor will—"
"Tyvor will try to use it. I know. But you told me the bond goes both ways.
If he can attack through it, I can defend through it.
If he can pour his poison in, I can pour something else out.
" I turned to face him fully. "You taught me what the network was designed for.
Communion. Connection. Shared consciousness.
What if that's the weapon? The opposite of pain.
What if this thing between us isn't a vulnerability?
What if it's the thing that breaks his control? "
Our eyes held. The last of the sunlight was fading and in the growing dark, his skin was beginning to glow, faintly, tentatively, the pale fire rising from dormancy like a creature waking from hibernation.
The silver-blue light traced the veins in his forearms and the architecture of his cheekbones and the curve of his jaw, and he was alien and beautiful and terrifying and mine.
Mine. The word formed in my mind without permission and I didn't push it away.
"Rebuilding it is not instantaneous," he said. His voice was rough, the second tone in it thickened the way it did when he was feeling too much to maintain the precise calibration of sound. "The severing was traumatic. The pathways are damaged. To restore them—"
"Contact. You said it strengthens through contact."
"Physical and psychic."
"Then show me." I held out my hand. Palm up. Open. The way he'd opened his hand to me weeks ago, giving me every possible moment to pull away.
He didn't pull away.
His hand found mine. Cool at first, that ninety-four degrees that I'd documented so many times it was memorized, and then warming, the way it always warmed when we touched, the temperature rising from cool to warm to hot as whatever was inside him responded to the proximity of whatever was inside me.
The light bloomed. Bright, brighter than I'd ever seen it: a cascade of silver-blue spreading from where our fingers intertwined, racing up his forearm, flooding the veins of his wrist and the network of capillaries beneath his translucent skin until his entire arm was a map of light and I could see the blood moving through him, the black-blue iridescence of his alien circulatory system illuminated from within.
And then the bond returned.
It hit me like a wave. Nothing gentle about it, nothing like the gradual tuning of a radio finding a frequency.
This was a dam breaking. A flood. His consciousness rushed into the space where it had been torn away and the emptiness that had lived behind my sternum for two days filled so suddenly and so completely that I gasped.
His heartbeat. There. Fourteen beats per minute.
Warm and slow and there, the steady pulse I'd carried for weeks, restored.
And underneath it, everything. His exhaustion.
His grief. His relief, so intense it tasted like tears.
His fear that I wouldn't come. His fear that I would.
And underneath all of it, directed at me with a focus so sharp it felt physical, a warmth that I could only describe as—
"I feel you," I whispered.
"I feel you too," he said. His voice was barely audible, the layered vibration of it pressed against my ribs.
"Show me. All of it. Not just the edges. Not just the polite frequencies. Everything."
He hesitated. "Everything includes the parts you saw when Tyvor—"
"Everything."
He opened.
Everything widened. An ocean, not a stream.
His consciousness merged with mine and I felt the full scope of what it meant to be Rael.
Three hundred years. Born on a ship between dead worlds.
A childhood of recycled air and psychic grief, dreaming other people's memories of a silver sky.
The Kallos atrocity: I felt it the way he'd felt it, through the network, every death a gap in the shared consciousness, every loss a tooth pulled from a jaw.
The shame of silence. The cowardice that tasted like metal.
The years of scouting, watching, reporting, enabling by omission.
And then Earth. And a woman on a beach carrying another woman's pack.
And a Vampyren who rubbed that woman's feet in the surf.
And the crack in everything Tyvor had built, the realization that love existed between species that should have been enemies, and if it existed there, then everything Tyvor claimed about the universe was a lie.
I felt his first sight of me. Through the network, at a distance, my heartbeat a warm frequency among hundreds. He hadn't known what he was feeling. He'd only known that one human pulse out of thousands made him want to stop running.
And I opened too. I let him feel what I was.
All of it, past the medic, past the function, past the survival machine.
The woman underneath. The woman who'd been alone for three years and told herself she preferred it.
The woman who'd watched every other woman fall for an alien and sworn she was different.
The woman who'd heard him say her name in a voice with two tones and felt the earth shift under her feet and been terrified, because wanting something you can't survive losing is the most dangerous thing there is.
We sat on the rock at the edge of the ridge with our hands intertwined and our minds open and everything flowing between us like a river that had been dammed and was now free.
The light under his skin pulsed with every beat of his heart and mine, synchronized now, the Lucian rhythm and the human rhythm finding each other in the dark.