There All Along

by Lauren Dane

  Kason pushed himself up on one hand to look down at her. Jodah, she reminded herself. Jodah, or else he might be forever lost to her. His fingers moved inside her, slowly but without hesitation. He was bringing her to climax again, and she was helpless against it.

  Her pleasure rose in tightly spiraling coils. Her muscles tensed. She held her breath, aching for release, every nerve straining toward that pinnacle to which Jodah was so expertly bringing her. Just before she reached it, he eased the pressure inside her and slowed the pace, holding her off.

  Teila lost track of how many times he edged her. She was vaguely aware of begging him, pleading against his mouth for him to make her come. Imploring him to fill her with his cock until finally he moved over her and did as she’d asked. Her orgasm began as he entered her, and she cried out from its strength.

  When her body clenched around him, Jodah fucked deeper inside her, his thrusts ragged. He found her neck, nipping and sucking as she bucked beneath him. They finished together, and he collapsed on top of her.

  Teila relished the crush of him. When he moved off her to curl on his side, facing away, the loss was worse than it had been the other times, because it was the closest he’d seemed to be to the man she’d married. She wanted more than anything to align herself with him, to press her face into the space between his shoulder blades. To sleep with him that way until morning.

  Instead, Teila eased herself from the bed and dressed quietly so as not to wake him. She stopped herself from kissing him before she left, though the desire for it was as fierce as any she’d ever had. His voice, though, stopped her at the door.

  “None of the others,” he said, “were ever like you.”

  7

  They are stronger than you are.

  They are faster than you are.

  They are more relentless than you will ever be.

  They will never stop.

  It had been drilled into every recruit since childhood. The Wirthera were the enemy that could not be defeated, only held back. No soldier joined the Sheirran Defense Force believing he or she could be part of destroying the Wirthera, only that they would most likely give their lives in service to keep them from consuming Sheira the way they’d already devoured and ruined so many other worlds.

  He was nameless, but not completely without memory. He knew the Wirthera could not be defeated. That had never stopped him from believing he should try. Three cycles, that’s what he remembered. Three cycles he’d spent leading his troops in the fringes of his own galaxy, far from home. Far from the life he’d had before his father had shamed him into no longer ignoring the family legacy of service. But what life had that been? All he could recall were the three cycles of cold and lonely space, fighting an unseen enemy, defending the people and world he loved against the attacks not of the Wirthera themselves, but of their advance scouts. Keeping his world a secret to keep it safe.

  Fire. Smoke. The clang of metal on metal. Screams. The brightness of starfire, so beautiful and deadly.

  Pain, always pain.

  He could not be sure what had gone wrong, only that the hornets they’d blown up had not all been destroyed. One must’ve gotten away, back through the fields of starfire that helped to protect this galaxy from detection. Found its way home. Returned with its bigger brother, an advance Wirtheran fleet.

  There’d always been rumors, of course, that the Wirthera were sneaky, distrustful even of their own technology, that sometimes they send their own troops to explore rather than relying on the fleets of hornets. That was how his ancestors’ world had been conquered, by suspicious Wirtheran ships scouting on the tail of a horde of hornets. His family had been one of the few that managed to escape, fleeing ahead of the giant cruisers that had surrounded the small planet and systematically began consuming every resource and obliterating all traces of life.

  Those ancestors had found a second home far away, not like their home planet of lush green jungles and vast seas, but instead of deserts and sand. They’d mingled and joined with the native population and homesteaders from other nearby worlds to make a new life, and generations later, their people were still hiding and fighting against the insidious, never-ending Wirtheran forces.

  Stronger. Faster. More relentless. His captors had proven themselves to be that and so much more. The Wirthera had an inhuman capacity for cruelty and an insatiable curiosity.

  They made . . . experiments.

  He had listened to the sounds of his shipmates’ screams for days. Locked in a featureless cell, no visible door or window, just smooth, polished metal that vibrated without cease and made his entire body ache. Naked, with nothing soft to lay on. Nothing to eat or drink.

  Periods of blackout, when they took him. When he woke, only the pain was left to show something had been done to him. It had been better than when they stopped making him unconscious, when they left him awake to watch the slit opening in his cell in place of the nonexistent door.

  Metal arms had cuffed him, dragged him free. The Wirtheran ’bots were different than the ones he was used to—perhaps constructed with the faces of their makers, they were alien, insectile things with multiple limbs and jointed bodies. They made no noises, no cooing chirps or whirrs or buzzes. Their silence was terrifying.

  In a different room, full of tools and instruments, they strapped him onto a gurney. They’d probably done it dozens of times before, but this time he was awake, fighting the bonds. It didn’t matter that he knew he couldn’t get free; the instinct to fight and survive overwhelmed all reason.

  And then . . . they came. The Wirthera, covered in their plated armor. He choked and gagged on the stink of them. He screamed at them to show their faces, but they made no answer. Always silent. Never ceasing.

  After a while, he begged for them to make him unconscious again. Not long after that, he begged for them to let him die. That was when the dreams began.

  Then it no longer mattered what they did to his body, because he had the dreams. In some small part of his mind, he knew the sexual pleasures offered to him were all part of the experiment, though what purpose they served he couldn’t begin to guess. He knew the flavors of the food he ate at the banquets they laid out for him were as false as the caresses of the women, that all the other joys he experienced were also not real. And yet the dreams were so much better than the pain or even the monotony of being in the cell that there came a day when he begged for them to take him, to do whatever they wanted, if only he could be in the dreamworld again.

  That was when the real pain had begun.

  8

  How is he?” The screen flickered, first stretching, then shrinking the Rav Aluf’s face.

  “He’s . . . improving.”

  Teila didn’t bother fiddling with the controls. The sound was fine, and she didn’t need to see her father-in-law’s expression to know he looked disapproving. She continued slicing the pellet of milka as she talked. She knew it would annoy him to see her doing what he’d call menial labor, but he seemed to forget that even with the money the SDF paid her for the care and keeping of its cast-offs, it wasn’t like she could afford a retinue of servants. Besides, she liked working in the kitchen.

  “What does that mean?”

  She gave the screen a sideways glance. It would also irritate him that she wasn’t giving him her full and direct attention. “It means that he’s improving. As they all do. Slowly. It takes time.”

  “His memory?”

  “He remembers plenty,” Teila said. “But only the bad things. Much of the time, he thinks he’s dreaming this place. Me. That he’s still being held by the Wirthera.”

  The Rav Aluf muttered angrily. “I thought being here would be best! That he’d return to his own mind sooner, but now I see I was wrong. I should’ve taken him home.”

  “This is his home!” Teila put down the carved blade and turned to the screen with her hands
on her hips. “This was his home for years before you played upon his guilt and made him a soldier!”

  “He was my son and an excellent soldier!”

  “Yes,” Teila said. “And he was also an excellent husband. My husband. And he’d have been an excellent father, had he been given the chance.”

  The Rav Aluf looked suddenly so much older. Defeated. He rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Would that he be given the chance now, daughter. For that, we can both ask the Mothers.”

  “My hands are tied,” she said after a minute. “I can’t tell him his real name or who I am to him. All I can do is be a wife to him as best I can, even though he doesn’t know me. I told you to take him. You didn’t want to.”

  “Do you still want me to?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. As his nightmares had eased, she’d seen more and more glimpses of the man she’d married. In fact, Teila was ashamed to have even suggested his father remove him—though she’d never have admitted it to him.

  “Do your best.” His tone made it clear he didn’t think it would be good enough.

  It was futile to retort. He would never soften toward her. Still, her anger manifested itself in words she had no time to say before he’d ended the call, and Teila had to satisfy herself with working out her anger on the milka pellet. It was in shards by the time she was finished. Ruined for anything but pudding.

  Stephin was the only one who liked milka pudding—everyone else took theirs solid or not at all. So after the treat had set and was ready to be eaten, Teila climbed the stairs to look for him. At this time of the day he was supposed to be taking lessons from his teachbot under the watchful tutelage of his amira, who was skeptical about the benefits of trying to educate a child so young. She often tried to sneak him out of the lessons, claiming there was plenty of time in adulthood for him to learn different languages or career skill sets, so it was no surprise to Teila when she found her son missing from the study room, though the ’bot was operational and droning the first one hundred useful words in Fendalese.

  It was a little more disconcerting when she couldn’t find him in his bedroom, or the living space they shared. Nor could she see him from any of the room’s three glass walls, overlooking most of the lighthouse property. Amira Densi was supposed to know better than to allow the boy to play along the sea unattended. Fenda children were born knowing how to swim, but Stephin was not Fenda. He could so easily step out to a depth over his head and be swept away.

  “Stephin?” Teila moved through their shared quarters, but her boy was nowhere to be found.

  Amira Densi she found dozing in a patch of sun at the end of the corridor. For an instant, Teila was furious, but when the amira let out a small snore that vibrated her whiskers, she reminded herself that Densi was an old, old Fenda. The Sheir natives lived so many more cycles than the homesteaders who’d come to populate the world. A nap in the sun was probably unavoidable for her.

  That understanding did nothing to stave off Teila’s growing unease. But before she could shake Amira Densi awake, she heard her boy’s familiar lilting laughter from down the hall. From Jodah’s room.

  Teila set off at a run—Stephin didn’t sound like he was in distress, but she wasn’t going to take a chance. Slipping through the doorway, she stopped short at the sight of Jodah sitting upright, Stephin on his lap. Both heads of identically curly dark hair bent over the tablet in Stephin’s hands. The boy was showing Jodah some of his favorite animations.

  Teila had watched them all a dozen or more times, could’ve recited them word for word, and her son had watched them far more often than that. He pointed excitedly at the screen, bouncing on Jodah’s lap. Jodah looked puzzled, but he was looking at the screen from a normal distance. Almost as though he could see it.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why do they have to catch the colored balls with those straws?”

  “Because it’s an excuse for them to dance around singing silly songs,” Teila said.

  Jodah looked up. He definitely saw her. His eyes widened and his lips parted, just a little. He looked . . . ashamed.

  “Your eyes?”

  “I can see,” he told her. “Everything was blurry when I woke up. But then this little one came in with this tablet, and at first everything was still unclear. But then as I watched, I noticed I could see the figures on the screen, not just fuzzy blobs.”

  “That means you’re healing.”

  He looked at her, his pale gray eyes narrowed. Despite the scabs and bruising still so prominent, it was a look she’d seen many times. Calculating. Working through the pieces of a puzzle. “Where am I?”

  “Adarat vi Apheera. The lighthouse.”

  His lips curved and his head tilted. “A lighthouse. I’m in a lighthouse.”

  “Yes. On the edge of the Sea of Sand.” She’d told him this before, but kept her voice carefully light, her expression neutral, trying to see if there was any sign of recognition. This had been his home for ten years. The place where he’d met and married her. It was the place his father had chosen to bring him so he could find his way back to himself.

  Jodah’s gaze grew shuttered. He shifted Stephin off his lap. “I’m tired now.”

  “Stephin, come.” Teila held out her hand for the boy, who reluctantly did as he’d been bid. “We’ll let you rest. I’ll be back with something for you to eat—”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You should eat,” she said gently. “I’ll bring a tray.”

  “I said I’m not hungry!”

  His shout startled the boy, who began to cry. Teila gathered him close, but Jodah was already on his feet, advancing on them both. She hadn’t forgotten how tall he was, or how broad. But she’d never seen him this way. Menacing and dangerous. She’d never seen him as a soldier.

  Instinctively, she pushed her son behind her and held up a hand. “You’re scaring the boy! Stop it!”

  Jodah moved fast and was on her in two long strides. One arm reached for her and he closed on her throat. Not squeezing or hurting, not yet, but the promise of it was there.

  Teila kept her voice steady. “Stephin. Go find Amira Densi. Now.”

  Her boy was so good, so obedient. He went at once, yelling for the amira. Teila met Jodah’s gaze without flinching or showing the fear rising in her.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Teila. I’m the—” His fingers squeezed a little, still not hurting, but the pressure gave her pause. “Lighthouse keeper.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “To rest and recover.”

  “Why a lighthouse?” Jodah’s pale eyes went dark from the wideness of his pupils. “Why not a medica?”

  She had no easy answer for that question. Why were any of them sent here to recover instead of a medica, other than they all had injuries that mere medicines and surgery couldn’t cure? That there were too many soldiers who came back and not enough places for them to recover? Before she could answer, Jodah moved closer, his hand still at her throat, the other moving to fist in her hair and tip her head back a little. His breath gusted over her face as he muttered into her ear.

  “You aren’t real.”

  Teila closed her eyes. He could kill her in a heartbeat. Snap her neck. Throttle her. If she gave him the wrong reply, the nanotriggers could be engaged. He could turn. The problem was, she didn’t know what she was supposed to say.

  “I’m real,” she breathed.

  He let her go so suddenly she sagged forward and had to grab the doorframe to keep herself from falling. Jodah backed away from her, disgust splashed across his face. She couldn’t tell if it was for her, or for himself. He turned his back, shoulders hunched.

  “That’s what they want me to think,” Jodah said. “So they can break me.”

  9

  She’d told him his name was Jodah, but that felt
like a lie, and if the name she’d given him wasn’t true, how could any of the rest of it be?

  He worked his fingers, one by one. His wrists, elbows, shoulders. Feeling every ache along every nerve, in every bone. He’d been broken, he remembered enough to know that. Put back together, but like a shattered vase, incapable of holding water.

  He studied his reflection. The eyes blinked when he wanted them to. The mouth opened and closed. This was his face in the mirror, but he didn’t recognize it.

  The ever-present agony was becoming memory, but that too could be a trick. They took the suffering away, only to return it a deca-fold. When he shattered the mirror with his fist it made a new, fresh pain, the shards of glass slicing at his skin. Making him bleed. Dispassionately, he watched the bright drops splash from his wounds onto the white tile floor. Then he wrapped his hand in a towel until the bleeding stopped.

  The woman had brought him a tray as she’d promised. The food on it was real—not broth or pudding or ration paste, but thick slices of bread and milka, a portion of grains and greens. He hadn’t touched any of it, wary of what it might contain, still half-believing that it was figment and would leave his body hungry no matter how much of it he ate. He’d had no real appetite for so long that the ache in his stomach had first seemed like just another torment, but now he fell upon the food ravenously and devoured every bite to the point of sickness.

  When his vision had cleared, so had a brightness in the edges of it. A long stream of numbers, images, and words, constantly scrolling so fast that none of them were clear. When he blinked or closed his eyes, the brightness was still there. If he concentrated on it hard enough, he might be able to bring it into focus, but doing so flared agony inside his skull sharp enough to keep him from trying it more than a few times.

  That was not part of the dream; he knew that much. But the rest of it . . . He paced the length and width of this space, measuring and mapping it with every stride. If this was a dream, the room could change at any time. If this was real . . . if all of this was real . . .