by S. L. Viehl
whatever Uel was, he was humanoid.
“I’m not blind.” I pushed my shades up so he could see my eyes. “In any way, shape, or form.”
“I gave you your chance to defeat Fayne today—”
“You gave me?”
“Perhaps it would be better to show you why I am obliged to hide behind this mask.” Slowly he removed
his obek-la and revealed his face.
His artificial face.
“You’re a reconstruct.” I’d seen a few of his kind on Terra, before they’d begun using biografting to
conceal their drone alloy skulls. None of them wore the synskin he had anymore. “Full body?”
“All but my brain and a few inches of my spine. My organic form was destroyed during an ambush on
Skogaqen. I had myself transferred to a drone chassis.” He tugged off a glove and a prosthetic hand to
reveal a clawlike grappler. “So you can believe me when I say I have no affection for Fayne or her kind.”
Reconstructs had originally been built as cheap slave labor for League colonies. Harvesting neural tissue
after natural death seemed to negate any accusation of slavery, until one of the reconstructs proved they
were capable of independent thinking and sentient behavior. They were freed, but plenty of species still
had their doubts about reconstructs qualifying as living beings. Uel probably would have a much harder
time governing the Tåna if the trainees knew he was ninety percent artificial.
I’d go along with the obvious reasons for him hiding behind a mask, but not the bout. “Then why did you
send me out there, knowing what she was going to do?”
“I was hoping she might try to spit in your eyes, as I suspect she’s done with all the others she’s killed. I
trusted your skills would keep you alive long enough to have it verified by a hoverdrone, so I could
discredit her in front of the silvers.” His synthetic face didn’t allow much expression, but I could see a little
anger. “Your clan got in the way.”
“Kol kept me from being blinded.”
Uel removed a small vial of spray from his tunic. “I was carrying the counter agent.”
“You said she’s done it before. Why didn’t you bust her for cheating and murdering them?”
“Skogaq saliva remains detectable for only a minute after it enters the mucous membranes.” He tucked
the vial in my hand. “Keep it with you. I doubt she will make a second attempt, but her kind are
unpredictable.”
“Thanks.” I looked around. “I need to move out of here, get a room of my own. Can you arrange that?”
“Yes.” He pulled his obek-la on. “Do you wish to stay in close proximity to your clan?”
“No.” I went to my garment storage unit. “Get me as far away from them as you can.”
That same night, Uel moved me to the other side of the trainees’ quarters, closer to medical and his own
offices.
“Kol has discontinued his training with me,” the Blade Master said as I finished putting away my scant
belongings. “If you wish, we can spar together before your training session begins tomorrow.”
“Am I that bad?” I asked.
“No. You are as fast as Kol is. You lack his stamina and power, but your agility compensates for it. With
more training, you will become what you were meant to be.” He pulled up a schematic of third level on
the room console, and highlighted one of the training rooms. “Meet me here an hour before training
commences. And here.” He handed me my Omorr blade. “Wear this at all times.”
Before he got to the door panel, I asked, “What if I have to kill her?”
He hesitated. “That is why I’m training you, Sajora. You must kill her.” When the panel opened, Kol
nearly slammed into him, and Uel stepped to one side. “I will see you tomorrow.”
The door closed, leaving me alone with the last person I wanted to see. And he was angry, so angry that
his skin had flushed a deep blue over his cheekbones and his eyes practically scorched the air between
us.
He made a full three-sixty turn before asking, “What is this?”
“This is my new room.” I gestured around me. “Like it? Not as big as the old one, of course, but I don’t
have to share the lavatory or listen to Os snore half the night.”
“Why did you leave us?”
“So none of the clan gets made into bait.” As if touching a magic talisman, I curled my fingers around the
hilt of my Omorr blade. “I don’t want to watch you go berserk again, either. This is getting pretty bad,
this thing between us. I thought we could use a break.”
His expression turned ugly. “If I were Terran, you would honor me.”
“Kol, you are part Terran, and I do honor you.” I tried to keep the hitch out of my voice. “Now honor
me and get the hell out of here.”
“I want to see your eyes.” He came toward me, still bunched up in knots, and somehow I held my
ground. I couldn’t help the flinch when he took off my shades, or the shudder when the tips of his fingers
skidded down my face. As if he were blind, and it was the only way he could see me.
I pulled his head down to mine and closed my eyes as soon as our brows touched. “If there were any
other way, I swear to you, Kol, I would. If there were.”
“The others say we are warrior-bonded.” He lifted his head and pressed his mouth against my brow. “I
believe it may be so. Today I nearly killed three people trying to get to you in the quad. One of them was
Nalek.”
I swallowed. “He said it only happens on the battlefield.”
“We are fighting for our lives every day. As well as our sanity.” Self-derision tinged his voice. “If that is
not the field of battle, then what is?”
I curled a hand around the back of his neck, trying to control my breathing. “When this warrior thing
happens, what do your people do?”
“We fight together as one.” He took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. “We do what we
must to survive, always together, so that we may preserve each other and live to bond.” He brought my
wrist up and pressed it against his throat, so that I could feel the heavy pulse there, echoing the frantic
beat of my own. “When there is a lull in the battle, we claim all we can have.”
Claim. That was a strange way to put it. Like it was some territory to be defended. “Even with your own
sister?”
“The Mother would not allow such to happen.” His breath warmed my face as he unfastened my tunic.
“You feel that as much as I do.”
I would have been happier with a DNA test. “Kol, I know what I want. I know what you want. It
doesn’t work.” It was so hard to drag the words out with his body so close to mine. I hissed in a breath
as he pulled off my tunic, then his. Our bare skin touching made me forget my own language. “We agreed
not to do this.”
“I am not your brother.” He bent down and kissed me, his mouth fast and hard and a little cruel. “Say it
for me.”
“I don’t know—” I got kissed again, and felt my trousers pool around my ankles. Then my
undergarments. “Boy, that is really not fair.”
“Release me, my heart.” The agony in his voice matched the expression on his face, the tension in his
touch. “Say the words and free me from this torment.”
I knew what I should have said. But the memory of Fayne’s blade descending on me made me give up.
“You’re not my brother.”
With a g
rowl or a laugh—I couldn’t tell which—he lifted me off the floor. That was when I realized we
were both naked. “I Claim what is mine.”
The room began to whirl, taking me and Kol along with it. Nothing felt familiar. It startled me—I’d had
sex before; be was the virgin—but none of my past experience prepared me for what happened next.
Kol came into me, body and soul.
Incredible sensations exploded all over my body as he took me down to the floor and covered me,
easing between my thighs, penetrating me by inches as he watched my eyes. I could feel the power coiled
inside him, now stretching and radiating as our bodies merged. I could taste his sweat on my lips, hear the
delicious catch of his breath as our hipbones touched and he was deep inside me.
At the same time, I felt Kol inside my head.
His emotions poured into my mind, an endless cascade of need, wave upon wave of desire so deep and
dark and powerful it swept away any conscious thought or plan I might have had. Then, like a net, it
scooped me up and held me suspended, enveloping me in his heat and wanting, so much wanting that I
thought I might scream from the pleasure of it. For in feeling his emotions, I discovered they matched my
own so precisely we could have been reflections inside each other.
I should have murmured something, encouraged him, but there were no words. And he already knew
what I was feeling, I could sense it, that I was as deeply inside his mind as he was in mine.
We became two streams of color and light and motion that met and sank into each other and grew
stronger, bolder, more brilliant. On one level I could feel him loving me, my back arching as I met the
thrusts of his body into mine, the sensations building and spreading within each of us. But Kol was behind
my eyes, loving me there as well, enfolding me in the strength and safety of his emotions, reaching deep
into my own for what he needed and wanted. And I gave him everything I had; I opened my soul up and
took him in.
Being with him was beyond anything I’d imagined, and I rediscovered the man I loved in so many ways.
In the gentleness of his hands as he stroked my breasts, in the deep laughter that came from him when I
rolled him onto his back. He looked up at me as I moved on him, and looked down at himself from inside
my head.
“Sajora.” He sat up, wound his arms around me, and lifted me from the floor as he stood. The movement
impaled me on him, and my head dropped back as my climax made me clench around him and shudder.
“You honor me.”
My back hit a wall, and I dug my fingers into his shoulders as his face hovered an inch above mine. His
hips drove his shaft into me with heavy, powerful thrusts, and all I could do was hold on and watch the
way his face changed, feel the tension rippling through his muscles. My own need returned with a
vengeance, and demanded more than release.
I tangled one hand in his short hair, and brought his mouth down to graze against mine. “Come with me,
Kol. Now, now.”
He buried himself inside me one final time, and said my name as his body jerked and shuddered. The
moment I felt his semen jetting inside me, I came again, and the sound that ripped from my throat blended
with his own deep groan of delight.
Slowly we slipped down the wall until we collapsed on the floor, our bodies still joined. I probably
should have felt regret or guilt, but I couldn’t. Not after taking him into me, where he belonged. Not ever
again, no matter what happened.
Kol eased me on my side and cradled my face with his hand.
“I did not know it would be like this.” He still sounded breathless and shaky. “I felt you inside my mind.”
“You got in my head, too.” I stroked the sweaty curve of his shoulder. “Is that supposed to happen?”
He smiled. “If it is not, we will not tell anyone.”
I felt him getting hard inside me, and wound my arms around his neck. “Maybe we should check it out
another time. You know. In case it was a first-time fluke.”
He kissed the end of my nose. “Agreed.”
We didn’t sleep much that night, but it seemed unnecessary. Between making love and trying to shower
together in the tiny lavatory, we talked. About everything, from Terra to Joren, the wrenching loneliness
we’d felt, our dreams. It seemed as if everything we’d experienced up to that day at the warrior’s quad on
Joren was simply preparation for being together.
“We could make a life together, Sajora.” Kol held me close and traced my features with one finger.
“When we leave this place, we can find one that belongs to us.”
“And the rest of the clan?” I tried to imagine what their reaction was going to be when they found out
about us. “We can’t just abandon them or ship them back to Joren.”
“We will all go together. We were meant to be a family, although few may ever understand.”
“Amen.”
He met my gaze. “What about your sire, Kieran?”
I jumped a little. “You know?”
“I suspected, before we left Joren. It seemed too coincidental that he was Terran, and you wanted to
divert his path. No, it is well, my heart,” he added when I would have said something. “I understand why
you did not wish to tell me, but I would never judge you for the sins of your sire. Do you still wish to
pursue him?”
I was torn. On one hand, the filthy bastard had captured my mother and made her watch her friends be
sold off to slavers, using her for his own pleasure. On the other, I had even more reason to live now, and
Kieran was death to everything he touched.
I also knew someone had to put things right, or the seven of us would remain in a limbo, belonging to no
world, no family. “I’m hunting him down as soon as we get out of here.”
“Then we go with you.” He rolled over and sank into me. “I will never leave you, Sajora.”
I closed my eyes and sighed as his emotions poured into me. I could get addicted to this real fast.
“Good, because you’re stuck with me.”
Several hours later I left him sleeping on my mat and went to meet Uel in the training room. I should have
been exhausted, but nothing could dent the glow of satisfaction I felt. Kol and I were together, and
nothing else mattered as much. There would be problems, of course, but now I knew we could work
them out between us. We’d never be alone again, not for the rest of our lives. My romantic thoughts
made me laugh a little.
This bond thing ought to be packaged and sold.
Uel was waiting when I entered the room, and asked me to secure the door panel. Only then did he
remove his obek-la and gloves, and point to the exhibition platform.
“We will begin with countering the pivoting attacks within the shahada.” He drew out his blades.
“Assume position on your mark.”
“Good morning to you, too, Blade Master.” I took out my tåns and shook my arms out before stepping
up on the platform. “I’m already pretty good at pivot thrusts.”
“I will make you better.”
I slipped into the no-mind, no-self discipline almost immediately—that’s how relaxed I was—and
countered every move the Blade Master made. Until he slipped through a minute break in my guard,
nicked my side, then called a halt to the match.
“I see what you mean by better.” I looked down and touched the rip in my tunic. “How did you spot th
e
chink in my guard?”
“You do not see; you feel the opening. As you feel part of the blades you use.” He moved back a step.
“Close your eyes.” I did. “Now, tell me to which side of the platform I move.”
I concentrated, listening for his steps. There were none, but I could feel a displacement of air to my right.
“South.”
“Correct. Open your eyes.”
I looked down to see a knife at my throat. “Obviously I need to work on this feeling part, too.”
“Obviously.” He dropped his hand. “Now, return to your mark and repeat the exercise, but keep your
eyes closed. Feel where my blade is, do not listen or look.”
It took the rest of the session before I began to get the hang of anticipating his moves with my eyes shut.
Before we finished the session, Uel turned off his visual accumulators.
“Attack me, and I will demonstrate what you will learn.”
I attacked the now-blind Blade Master, but there was no move I could make that he couldn’t anticipate. I