“I don’t want to stand here discussing it.” Stone faced, Mateer took Megan’s elbow, making it clear he was ready to leave. “It’s not good for my mate to be kept in the cold night air in her condition. This experiment is authorized for one week and then we’ll see.”
“I’ll expect to see the two of you in my office at the clinic right after lunch,” Megan said over her shoulder as Mateer escorted her away from the lake’s edge.
Taura pulled her hand from his and settled onto the log again, wrapping the blanket close. “Hard as it is to admit, right now I’m a bit overwhelmed.”
“What other solution was there?” Jadrian was surprised to see her visibly wilt after her strength during the discussion with Mateer and the doctor. Maybe she was still a lot weaker than he realized. “You either return to the hospital, which means being in a locked room and probably in restraints again as soon as the next flashback hits, or we try this. Mateer was never going to agree to you moving into the women’s dormitory cave, much less a cave of your own. Very few people get a private cave other than mated pairs and alphas.”
Voice low and stubborn, avoiding his gaze, she said, “I don’t have to stay in this valley.”
Concerned she wasn’t facing the reality of the situation, he searched for the right words and decided blunt truth was the only way to proceed. Seating himself beside her, he took one of her hands. “Yes, you do. This world is full of danger, not only from the Khagrish, but from wild animals and other natural hazards. Even if in your other life in the Sectors you were a wilderness scout, not a com tech, you’ve barely recovered from a fever, and are certainly not at full strength.”
Taura laughed. “I can’t honestly say the idea of tromping through the forest, dodging big wild animals, totally roughing it, sounds like anything I might ever have done. I doubt I’m a first-in scout.”
He was happy to hear a little bit of mirth from her, taking it as a good sign. “Anyway, I don’t think my pack leaders would allow you, or any human to leave the valley. A few individuals have asked and been refused. We can’t risk the Khagrish learning anything about our sanctuary or who’s here, or any other intelligence. Badari would be sent to hunt you down and bring you back.”
Eyes narrowed, she frowned. “So in essence you’re issuing a threat.”
“Don’t take it that way,” he said, surprised by her accusatory tone.
“I don’t want to fight with you, and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, including tonight.” She brushed her hair off her face. “I think I’m a pretty independent person at the core, not used to depending on others. And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—there’s not going to be anything physical between us in this cave.” Taura closed her eyes as if remembering unpleasant events. “After what the Khagrish did to me, getting close to anyone, even a man as attractive as you, isn’t on my list.”
From his own experiences with the Khagrish, he could make a good guess as to what else she’d suffered in captivity. Fists clenched, fighting both his memories and a hot flash of anger on her behalf, he said, “I give you my word as a Badari—this arrangement is purely for me to assist you in gaining control of your memory issues. Then we go our separate ways, me to the barracks cave with my pack, and you to the women’s cave.” And why was he already dreading the separation? Jadrian hoped he wasn’t getting in over his head with this woman who affected him on so many levels.
“Do you think we can actually make a difference in the measly one week deadline your boss gave me?”
“Mateer is the top enforcer for the pack, the second only to the alpha,” he corrected gently. “Not merely my boss.”
“Okay, every military has its own titles for ranks. Look me in the eyes and tell me this scheme of yours doesn’t include us falling into bed together. Convince me you honestly think this will work.” Taura stared into the amber glow of Jadrian’s eyes and tried to assess his sincerity while resisting the allure he represented. She wasn’t kidding. After the Khagrish abuse, physical intimacy was the last thing she wanted but, on the other hand, her rescuer was one attractive male, with a kind heart and an old-fashioned courtly manner towards her. I’d have to be dead not to feel the pull.
And the other alternative the Badari enforcer had presented her, confinement for her own good in the hospital, was unacceptable. It’d be easier to escape from the cave situation if she found it necessary to flee this place, despite Jadrian’s warning. And the doctor was insisting on seeing her daily, so she could always ask for a change if Jadrian wasn’t as trustworthy as she believed him to be. Gazing into the warm glow of those incredible eyes, Taura couldn’t find it in her heart to doubt him.
“You and I are both determined survivors of the worst the Khagrish could do to us,” he said. “I came back from the brink of madness, so I’m sure you can learn to handle your situation, at least enough to function in the valley.”
She reflected on the various times they’d been together, including the events of this strange evening. Jadrian never displayed anything but calm. However, she of all people knew appearances could be highly deceiving. “I don’t mean to offend, but you don’t give off the vibe of a person suffering from anxiety or a stress disorder.”
Jadrian was silent, not rising to the challenge in her words. He tucked the edge of the blanket a little more closely over her legs and when he did speak his words were completely off topic. “Are you warm enough?”
In disbelief she asked, “What? Are you avoiding my question?” Doubts assailed her again.
“Not at all, but the night breeze off the lake is cold and if we’re going to have a long discussion, we should probably go to the cave. I can light a fire for you, and I stashed a few basic rations there for my own use if you need a snack.” He fidgeted as if embarrassed and his smile seemed crooked. “I like to sneak away to the cave on my downtime, have peace and quiet. I’m not much like the rest of my pack on this point. Every now and then I—I need the distance from my packmates.”
“As a result of what you went through?”
His gaze fixed over her shoulder, staring at the lake, he nodded. “Probably.”
Her hands were icy cold, and the blanket wasn’t keeping the night chill at bay too effectively, if at all. “All right, we can suspend the discussion until we’re beside the cozy fire you’ve promised me.”
He helped her up from the log. Despite her blanket, the cold had seeped into her bones. She was stiff and awkward as they began walking to the north. “Thank you for all the nice things you’ve done for me, by the way,” she said after a few minutes of silently following his path. “You’ve gone way out on a limb for someone you don’t even know. I’m grateful but—”
“You don’t truly know me, and you’re dealing with a lot, I understand.”
She thought he might actually.
The cave was a good twenty minute walk from the lake. Jadrian picked her up with permission and carried her the last bit of the way, including the final stretch up a hill leading to the cliff where the cave was located.
“This valley wall is riddled with caves,” he said conversationally. “We’ve checked out all of them and driven away any predators living here previously. Even the biggest animals don’t want to tangle with a Badari.”
Taura found the remark a bit puzzling, but she assumed he meant his size as well as the fact he and his friends would have been armed with pulse rifles. “How can you see anything in this gloom?” she asked as they entered the cave. The blackness of the surroundings left her disoriented. There was a faint glow here and there, apparently from plant life clinging to the stones.
“We have night vision far beyond what your people possess. Another gift from the Khagrish.” Voice bitter, he set her on a convenient rock. She felt a flat surface underneath her and curled up as much as possible under the blanket. Jadrian’s body generated a lot of heat, and she missed his reassuring presence already.
He moved away from her. “I’ll have the fire roaring in a mi
“I’m fine, do what you have to do.” She tried to control her breathing and to concentrate on a mental picture of the lake under the three moons and the stars. The Khagrish had left her in complete darkness on occasion, and immersed her in sensory deprivation tanks at other times. The memories were rising in her mind like waves. If she took ten steps in a straight line right now, she could be outside again and she fastened on the reassuring fact. No one was holding her prisoner here—she’d entered the cave with Jadrian of her own free will and had no reason to regret the decision. Yet.
Then with a whomp sound, a cheerful red and yellow fire blazed up and glittering rock formations here and there became visible in the cave close to her. More importantly, Jadrian was illuminated walking towards her, as imposing and reassuring as always. She slid off the rock, annoyed to suffer a wave of vertigo. Nerves or the real thing? Am I going to question every single thing about myself and my reactions forever?
Breaking her bleak train of thought, he took her hand. “Come, sit beside the fire. I’ll make tea for us, good for warming the insides. Then we can talk.”
“And those rations you mentioned? Even an emergency sustenance bar would taste good about now.” She rubbed her stomach as he directed her to another boulder with a fallen slab of the sparkling stuff as a backrest. Veins of opalescent gemstone ran through the darker material. “My first meal in complete freedom.”
“I wish I’d gotten a more appealing selection for you.”
“You didn’t exactly know I’d be coming.” The genuine chuckle welling from her chest surprised her and she chalked the mirth up as a good sign she was returning to a healthier mental state. She was proud she hadn’t given in to a panic attack in the dark, and she rested contentedly as he bustled around brewing the tea. Accepting the mug he gave her with both hands, Taura sipped a bit of the beverage. The taste was light, tangy and satisfying.
Opening a pouch at the side of the fire, Jadrian withdrew an emergency ration, unwrapped it partway and offered it to her with a bow. “Dinner?”
“More like midnight snack.” She took a bite and savored it, even though the bar had the consistency of cardboard and less flavor than the tea. At least she was out of the hospital. “Where did you get a Sectors nutrition ration?”
“When we take down a lab, we salvage as much as we can from the ruins. Scrounging materials and repurposing items is how we’ve built this settlement, such as it is. I know you’ve only seen the hospital, but we do have a few other small buildings. The Shemdylann pirates, or whoever is supplying the Khagrish with humans, have also given them huge quantities of human goods. As if the captured ships were stripped down. I don’t know what the Khagrish plan to do with most of it, but they’re greedy bastards.”
“And the enemy don’t get suspicious about where you’ve gone? What you’re doing?”
“We destroy the lab sites thoroughly so I assume their commanders think everything was vaporized. The Khagrish refuse to believe we Badari are anything but animals and, even with the evidence of several razed labs in front of them now, they don’t seem able to accept we’re a unified force with the humans.” He shrugged and sipped his tea. “My alpha says the situation won’t last, can’t last, and at some point we’ll be in an open war for our survival.”
“He’s probably right, but selfishly I hope it’s not tonight.” Where on earth can I fit into this community? Aspects of what Jadrian was discussing set off ripples in her mind, as if she’d been involved in similar situations before, but how could she have been? She wasn’t a soldier, of that she was sure. Even if she did apparently have spectacular muscle memory of self-defense moves. “They used the black bracelet on me,” she said, hardly aware she was speaking. She rubbed her right wrist where the neurocontroller had been implanted until the Badari removed it during her rescue. “I tried to fight, but the pain the Khagrish can dish out with that thing was incredible. And then the scientists paralyzed me and did whatever they wanted.”
Unsettled by her fidgeting, Jadrian caught her restless hand. “No one will ever put another neurocontroller on you. Anyone who wants to restrain you will have to come through me first. You have my word on it.”
She curled her fingers around his, giving him a squeeze, then withdrew her hand. “You were going to tell me what happened to you, remember? Why you relate to my ordeal? How I can start to handle the constant incidents?”
An unaccustomed tightening flared in his gut as memories he usually kept firmly locked down rose to the forefront of his mind. “Not everything I did will work for you, being human. But yes, I dealt with a similar problem. It was when I was a teenager. Generation seven was alive, firmly in charge of the pack.”
“Generation seven?” Head tilted, she raised one eyebrow. “You lost me.”
“We’re engineered beings, created by the Khagrish. I’m in the eighth generation. Prior to our escape from captivity, the Khagrish executed all members of a generational cohort at a certain age as a matter of course, to make room for the next group to be trained and experimented on with refined techniques and methods.”
Mouth open, she gasped. “How awful.”
He kept going. Telling his story was painful but, if it would help Taura find a path to peace, he’d share. “The Khagrishi in charge of the program at that time picked me and two other men my age from the ranks of cadets, separated us from our packs, threw us naked into solitary confinement cells and commenced a series of experiments.” Glancing at her, he amended his sentence to be more blunt. She needed to know he truly had been through many of the same things she’d suffered. “Torture. Mental, physical, everything at their command to push me to my limit and beyond, trying to break me. I was told over and over I was a sample, and the fate of my entire pack could depend on the results of the experiment.”
“But you survived.”
“Over the centuries, the genetic manipulations have given us abilities the Khagrish and their customers prize.” He flashed his talons for her, ignoring the surprised flinch she couldn’t suppress. “But we’ve also developed other abilities as unintended side effects, and we keep those well hidden from the scientists. We can touch mind to mind within the pack. Aydarr and Mateer took turns reaching out to me, giving me strength, even when I tried to block the connection so they wouldn’t know how weakened I was.”
“No help from whoever was in charge of generation seven?”
“The old alpha wasn’t concerned with a cadet who hadn’t officially joined his pack, hadn’t sworn loyalty to him yet. He was about as different from Aydarr as it’s possible to be. But I can’t criticize him—he and his packmates endured their time with the Khagrish and coped as best they could. Everyone has to find their own path.” Jadrian took a deep breath as harrowing memories of his treatment from the generation seven pack leaders surfaced. The elder generation’s soldiers hadn’t welcomed him, hadn’t trusted him, tried to kill him on more than one occasion. His unexpected survival of the torturous ordeal at the hands of the Khagrish made the old alpha suspicious that Jadrian had given the aliens some concession, become their collaborator. Aydarr, Mateer and Reede had literally saved his life. He tried to give Taura an inkling of what he’d been through. “Anyway, I did survive through the grace of the Great Mother, and one day the guards dragged me from the lab cell block to the cadet barracks and left me bleeding on the floor. And again Aydarr and Mateer helped, as well as others in generation eight, although we had to be careful, because the experiment wasn’t over. The Khagrish wanted to see how the pack would treat me, whether I could reintegrate into their ranks. My generation eight alpha and his enforcers set the tone, protected me until I regained my strength.”
“What about the other two cadets?”
Shaking his head, he poured himself more tea, mostly to have something to do with his hands. Talking about the trauma made him nauseous. “We never saw them again.”
“So you had survivor guilt on top of the trauma,” she said in a low voice. “It’s not your fault you couldn’t save them.”
He’d never discussed his inner shame with anyone, the pain of knowing he’d been the only one of the three to survive, or to have been allowed to survive by the scientists. “How did you know?”
Taura shook her head. “Stands to reason if three of you were in the experiment and only you made it out alive, you couldn’t help but blame yourself for their deaths to some extent.” She left her chair and gave him a cautious hug before returning to the seat. “At least I don’t have that burden on top of my flashbacks. I thought I was the only human on this damn planet before you broke into my cell. And I still don’t remember who I was or where I was before I woke up in the lab. But if you had psychic help from your packmates to overcome the trauma, the information doesn’t help me much. I can’t link with my previous self in my own head, much less you or another Badari.” Her smile wavered, but he appreciated the obvious effort she was making.
“No, true, but I had to learn to handle the episodes I had. The pack had to keep the psychic link a secret from the Khagrish, so there were plenty of times I was losing self-control and no one dared to help.” He ticked off the next points on his fingers. “I learned the warning signs, I learned to control my breathing, I challenged myself to examine what true threats there were in the environment at any given moment and talk myself down from the extreme reaction. When Dr. Garrison was telling me her planned approach to working with you, I recognized common elements with my own self developed strategies. I think your challenge will be to interrupt the flashback long enough to gain control. I believe I can help since you respond to me even under the duress of memory.”
“The nightmares are the worst,” she said, watching the dancing flames, enjoying the crackle and pop of sparks. “I don’t wake up. I slide from sleep into the traumatic memory, and it’s so real.”
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