by Nalini Singh
Stefan did the same before stepping close to her.
“Ready?” he said, as he had the first time he ’ported her.
“Yes.”
They arrived at the rock formation an eyeblink later, which spoke to the relative proximity of the area—and yet it was far enough away that she couldn’t see or hear anything from the village. Taking out the map, she pinpointed their current position, then traced the line that should lead them to the spring itself.
“I have it,” Stefan said and set off without another glimpse at the map.
A ten-minute walk later, they ducked into the mouth of a cave and followed the sense of damp heat until they found themselves in a chamber lit by the fading evening light that poured in through a hole in the roof, the air hazy with curls of steam.
“In,” she ordered Stefan, putting down her stuff and taking his. “Now, Stefan.”
“You should—”
“Don’t be chivalrous,” she ordered. “You’re moving more stiffly already. Get in before I push you in.”
A small pause before he lifted his fingers to the seal of his jacket, their eyes locked. It felt shockingly intimate to watch him do that simple act, butterflies taking mad flight in her stomach. Turning her back to give him privacy, she tried to focus on the wall in front of her, but was breath-stealingly aware of every tiny sound Stefan made as he stripped out of his clothes.
“You never speak so authoritatively to me on Alaris,” he murmured, his voice stroking over her skin.
She fought a shiver. “You’re my boss on Alaris.”
The sound of water lapping, a slight hiss. “It is extremely hot.”
“Good.” Keeping her back to him, she frowned and stepped closer to another area of misty vapor. “I think there’s a tiny spring here, too.” Smiling when she discovered she was right, she took all their clothes and began to dump them piece by piece into the water, pulling out each in turn to scrub it against a large wet stone in an effort to get some of the dirt out at least. Once she had an armful, she walked outside and placed the clothes on sun-warmed rocks to dry.
“I can do mine, Tazia,” Stefan said when she came back in and returned to her task.
Rolling her eyes, she looked over her shoulder. “Can you ever just accept a favor and say thank you?”
Wide shoulders exposed by the way he sat in the spring, his strong arms braced along the stone edge, he held her gaze. “Thank you.”
The words felt like a caress. “You need to sink lower into the water. That falling beam hit your shoulder, too.” She’d felt her heart stop beating when she’d seen him go down, had dropped everything to run to his side, check he was alive. The memory of fear made her voice sharp as she said, “Or do you want me to push you down?”
• • •
Tazia was in a very bad temper today, Stefan thought, as she turned back to her chore. “Have I done something to offend you?” he asked when she came back inside the cave after taking care of the last of their clothing.
She sat down on the cave floor with her back to him. “No.”
He didn’t understand emotion, but he knew she wasn’t telling him the truth. “The spring is large. You can share the space,” he offered, though it was difficult for him to be in such close proximity to another being, and particularly to Tazia.
“Tazia,” he said when she didn’t reply.
“I can’t.” Keeping her back to him, she leaned forward as if she’d drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. “I know it may seem irrational and old-fashioned to you, but I was brought up to be . . . chaste.” The words were taut. “To be naked only with the man I took as my husband. I don’t live in that world anymore”—harsh strain in those words—“but I can’t discard who I am like it’s an old coat.”
“I understand,” Stefan said, having already guessed at Tazia’s value system after so carefully noting every single thing about her in the year they’d worked together. “Your cultural mores are no more or less irrational than the protocol under which my people are conditioned.”
He saw her shoulders relax. Rising, she walked over to sit on a rock nearer the spring, her eyes on the entrance and her body in profile to him. “Have you ever thought of breaking Silence?” she asked. “I . . . broke some of the rules when I left home.”
“Important rules?” he asked quietly.
“Yes. The most important.” Her hand fisted on her thigh, small and so fine boned that he sometimes wondered how she handled the tools necessary to her profession. Even with all the advances in tech, wrenches were still heavy; torque still required muscle.
“I never did think about breaking the rules,” Stefan said. “The rules are safe. It’s why my race chose Silence over a hundred years ago.” Of course, had his conditioning been without flaw, he would’ve had difficulty even talking about the protocol.
Tazia turned a little on the rock, enough that she could look at his face. “I’ve heard rumors about why, but never knew if they were true.”
“Our psychic abilities are powerful, but they predispose us to insanity and violence.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?” Then she half smiled. “Of course not. You’re Silent.”
Stefan thought about how to respond to that. It was something he’d never have considered before Tazia, but her honesty deserved his own. “My Silence is problematic because of the trauma I suffered in childhood.”
What even most Psy didn’t know about Silence was that the conditioning for those like Stefan, people with dangerously strong abilities, was reinforced by pain controls termed dissonance. If Stefan broke Silence on any level, he’d be punished with pain. The worse the breach, the more debilitating the pain, until it was possible it could kill him . . . Or that was how it was meant to work.
Part of the reason Stefan had been shifted from Arrow training to the commercial arm of the Council’s telekinetic arsenal was that his brain was deeply resistant to certain aspects of the conditioning process, including the dissonance controls. His psychic trainers had finally declared it to be a fundamental flaw, one that could not be fixed.
No one had wanted to release such a strong telekinetic into the commercial team, but a soldier without foolproof conditioning couldn’t be trusted in the field. He might fracture and, with his dissonance controls erratic at best, no one could be certain he wouldn’t take his partner or team with him when he lost control of his telekinetic powers.
Tazia’s eyes widened. “So do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” What he did know was that things had begun to change in him the first time he’d spoken to Tazia Nerif, parts of the conditioning just falling away. “I’m not as perfect a Psy as I should be.”
“No, you’re not.” Tazia’s dark eyes held his. “You care too much about these people.”
Even if Stefan didn’t know if he felt, Tazia knew. He’d almost burned himself down to the bone already.
When he straightened in the water, his shoulders and upper body came fully into view. She sucked in a breath, her gaze taking in the muscle and tendon that was all that was holding him together at the moment. “You’re too thin, Stefan.” She hadn’t understood until this week just how much energy psychic power burned.
“I can run until it’s no longer necessary,” he said, as if he were a machine.
“Stefan.”
He met her furious gaze. “I am keeping track of my physical health, Tazia . . . I promise.”
She nodded jerkily, his words feeling as if they meant far more than he’d said. When he rose farther, she blushed and looked away. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. You should bathe—your muscles are as tired.”
“I didn’t have half a house fall on me.” Waiting until he was dressed in a slightly damp pair of pants that she’d fetched for him, she said, “It’s still hot out. Go check on the clothes I left on
the rocks. Your pants will dry quicker outside, too.”
Stefan accepted the command without argument and left. Stripping quickly, she got into the water—oh, it was hot!—and used handfuls of the sand she could feel around the bottom of the pool to scrub her body. Might as well exfoliate if she couldn’t wash properly. It would get all the dirt off.
She even used the sand on her face, albeit a little more gently. As for her hair, she dunked it under the water and hoped the minerals in the spring would help cleanse it.
Though she tried to be quick, she couldn’t fight the need to linger for just a few minutes, let the heat soak into her aching flesh. Groaning as she got out, she dried off then, skin hot, wrapped the towel around herself before gathering up the clothes she’d stripped off and walking through the gloom to the entrance. “Stefan?”
“I’m here.” He stirred in the shadows to the left.
Placing the dirty items next to her, she said, “I need some clean clothes.”
A whisper of movement and then he was handing them to her. “They’re a little damp still, but nothing that your body heat won’t dry.”
She took the small bundle and shifted back inside far enough that the shadows gave her cover. After quickly shimmying into the clothing—while trying not to think about the fact that Stefan had handled it all, including her panties and bra—she walked out, towel and dirty clothes in hand. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you for rinsing out the clothing; I believe the minerals in the spring did a good job of cleaning them.”
Still embarrassed at their inadvertent intimacy, she kept her head down as they collected up the other clothing. It didn’t take long, and soon enough, she was standing next to Stefan again, ready to be ’ported back to the village. “Wait,” she said, urging him to turn toward her. “Let me see that bruise.”
“It’s too dark,” Stefan murmured, but stepped close enough that she could push up his T-shirt and check the damage.
With so little distance between them, she could see him clearly, even in the dim early evening light. “It doesn’t look as raw and swollen at least.” Lowering the T-shirt lest she give in to the urge to touch him, feel his heart beating safe and strong under her palm, she said, “Okay, let’s go. The villagers feel better just knowing you’re nearby, especially with the aftershocks.”
“I think they feel the same about you.”
He ’ported before she could reply.
Chapter 6
The next day passed as the others had done—in hours of hard work. Sometime just after dark, Tazia blew out a breath and glanced at the villager who’d been her assistant throughout the continuing repair operation of the village’s small power plant. The teenager had just begun an electronics course but was the most qualified person after the station manager—who was currently in an emergency medical tent with two broken arms and a bruised skull.
“Here we go,” she said to her teen assistant and flicked a switch.
Nothing sparked, a low hum filled the air . . . and lights flickered on all around them. Cries of joy from outside told her the effect wasn’t localized. High-fiving the boy when he raised his hand, she used the light to give the entire plant a thorough going-over.
Of course Stefan was still working when she finished; the lights had given him a longer work window. Shaking her head, she was walking toward him with the intention of giving him the nutrition bar in her pocket when the aftershock hit. It was violent, throwing her to the ground and making the already weakened structures around them collapse. She saw Stefan turn, yell out her name, and—
She was in the desert just outside the village, away from all the buildings, Stefan beside her. “Wait! Stefan!” Except it was too late. He was already gone.
He returned a second later with a small child, then another and another.
The shaking finally stopped.
Hugging the crying, distressed children, she calmed them down enough that they could walk back into the village. It was a mess. Leaving the children in the care of two previously injured women who were nonetheless stable and strong enough to take charge, she ran to what appeared to be the worst-affected part of the village.
Stefan was already lifting debris. Shoving up her sleeves, she joined in.
Hours passed.
Taking him water, she put her hand on his arm when he swayed. “You’re about to flame out.” He’d mentioned that term to her one night in their tent, told her it was worse than taking a rest. If he flamed out, his body and mind would just shut down, possibly for an entire twenty-four hours.
“I can feel a life, Tazia.” His eyes were turbulent when he looked at her. “A small, flickering life beneath all the rubble.”
“Oh, God.” She looked at the sheer amount of debris that had to be shifted. “Okay, okay.” Turning, she ran as hard as she could toward their tent. She grabbed a spare water bottle, filled it with fresh water and dumped in two vitamin packets, then shook it as she dug out several nutrition bars.
Stefan was shifting more of the wreckage when she returned. “Stop.” She stood in front of him, touched her hand to his face when he didn’t seem to see her.
“I can’t.”
“You’ll be useless if you fall down. Drink.” Ripping the wrappers off the nutrition bars one by one, she made him eat all of them.
His eyes didn’t move off the rubble the entire time, the villagers focusing their efforts on the area he’d indicated. Looking at them, Tazia had an idea. “Look, you can’t shift all that. It’s too much.”
“There’s someone—”
She touched his face again, well aware she was breaking all kinds of taboos. His and her own. “Be smart, Stefan. I’m an engineer—I can see a way through that rubble. Shift only what’s necessary to create a stable tunnel to the victim.”
That got his attention. “How?”
“Step by step.”
They worked together for the next two hours to create that tunnel, Tazia making judicious and careful use of Stefan’s depleted abilities as well as the hands of the villagers. When the little girl who’d been trapped actually scrambled out of the tunnel on her own power, Tazia wanted to collapse to her knees in tears. Instead, she looked at Stefan and said, “Enough.”
This time, he listened, going back to the tent to fall into an exhausted sleep so deep, she knew it’d be longer than six hours. That didn’t matter. The important work had been done this night.
• • •
Stefan woke to the scent of some kind of liniment. Glancing down, he realized immediately that someone had put it on his chest as well as on the shoulder he’d injured.
Tazia.
Regardless of his exhaustion, he’d have woken at any other touch. He didn’t trust anyone else that much, wasn’t physically comfortable so close to anyone but her; their time together here had erased any barriers he might’ve had. And when it came to Tazia, those barriers had always been thin at best.
Rising on that thought, he glanced at his timepiece and saw he’d been out for ten hours. Better than he’d expected, especially since he’d come to within a hairbreadth of a true flameout. When he stepped out into the sunshine, he saw nothing to say that there’d been a second aftershock.
Ten minutes later, he returned to work—after first consuming the fortified water and nutrition bars Tazia had left out for him. It was strange to know that someone who gained no current benefit from his abilities cared if he lived or died. He thought his mother must’ve truly cared because Stefan was her child, but after that, people had only cared because he was a Tk.
As the people on Alaris cared—if something happened to him, there went their emergency escape hatch.
However, out here, Tazia had no reason to care for him. He was doing nothing for her, and it wasn’t as if she was trapped. Emergency transports were going in and out now on a relatively regular basis
, so she didn’t even need him to get her out of here. Her ticket back to the Alaris offices was also prepaid and in her possession.
There was no reason for her to care for him enough to find the liniment and smooth it on his chest; no reason to care enough to make sure he ate. It was as if she cared . . . for him. For Stefan, the man aside from his gift. He hadn’t known that was possible.
“Sir.” One of the villagers came to stand near him.
“Yes?” he said, having stopped telling them to use his name. They were in awe of his ability and refused to treat him any other way.
“Thank you.” The man’s eyes burned with wetness before he blinked the tears away, his throat moving as he swallowed. “My daughter,” he said in what was clearly an unfamiliar language. “You save.” He waved at the rubble where the tunnel had been. “Thank you.”
Stefan went to say it had been a group effort, then recalled Tazia’s words about being gracious. “Is she well?”
“Yes.” The man beamed. “Happy.”
Stefan nodded, and that seemed to be enough.
Later that night, as they lay in their tent, he told Tazia what had happened.
She said, “They see you as a god. If you moved here, you could have your own fiefdom, complete with the requisite nubile virgins to attend to your every need.”
Having witnessed such interaction between other members of the Alaris crew, including between Tazia and her friend Andres, he thought perhaps he was being teased. It was . . . welcome. No longer was he standing outside looking into Tazia’s complex, multihued world; she had invited him in.
“I wouldn’t wish to rule,” he said seriously. “There is no privacy for those who rule.”
“And you like yours.” Rustling sounds, as if she was shifting in her sleeping bag to face him. “How’s your chest, your shoulder?”
“Fine.”
A sigh before she got up and flicked on a flashlight. “Let me see.”